The Worst Kind of Colors
by S.Zix
Summary: Colors can trigger that dark other side of people, but Vincent's found that it isn't just the colors that trouble Yuffie Kisaragi.
1. That

_**That**_

Other people—specifically people _not_ Vincent—think in words. Vincent Valentine, after a period of trial and error-also known as his life, came to realize that this unquantifiable gap in thought processes bore the brunt of the blame for his inability to seamlessly communicate.

Vincent thought in vague shapes and colors: half sensations crawling along the walls of his inner cortex, too fleeting to become concrete. He relied on a faulty black box mechanism to sputter out inadequate and inexpressive sentences. It also handled the reverse process. Vincent read slower, took longer to contribute to a conversation, and often burned through the patience of his acquaintances before the value of his commentary could be considered.

So he gave up.

Daily, he felt his internal frustrations distance him further from the people around him. Eventually, he became his own words, locked comfortably inside a coffin for thirty years.

Doctor Crescent had not provided him the respite he had needed either. Their relationship served a use-use purpose. Both sought physical relief from the stress of their own minds: Lucrecia because her work required constant mental strain, and Vincent because his own mind refused to behave as a proper part of himself.

Without intellectual interaction, Vincent Valentine may have known _of_ Lucrecia Crescent, but he had never truly met her, only an image with which he had carried on a brief and wild affair inside his head.

As for Lucrecia Crescent having known Vincent Valentine—well, if she had, Vincent thought, she had one over on him. But the notion almost made sense, he considered. After all, she had invested him with the very thing he had craved all his life: voices in his head.

They were both "so sorry," to have never met. How could you tell someone goodbye when you had never known them?

When Vincent told people that he atoned for his mistakes regarding the good doctor, it was simply the result of a failed computation on the part of the black box. His words, once again, refused to match his thoughts. Vincent atoned for the fact that he lived inside his own head and felt incapable of contributing anything useful to the world around him.

Vincent Valentine considered it nothing personal when he ignored the incessant blabbering of Yuffie Kisaragi. He did not find her particularly annoying, or particularly anything. Most of the time, he could not distinguish her from Barrett Wallace.

Yuffie existed as a constant presence that he had merely to grunt to placate. The twittering girl did not presume to desire any responses from him, and her words were often simple enough for him to keep up the appearance of consideration. The other members of AVALANCHE, he noticed, seemed incapable of being too quiet for her. In the same token, they expected him to be louder.

The two fragments often fell to the side, using one another in a manner that reminded him bizarrely of his relationship with Lucrecia Crescent.

How, then, Vincent wondered absently, staring at the windowsill on which the perpetrator sat, had Yuffie Kisaragi become the first girl he ever knew? But worse yet, how could she have forced him to know himself, to untangle and decipher the knotted resentments he had hidden for good reason?

And how, worst of all, now that he had known someone well enough for the first time, would he ever find the ability to tell her goodbye?

Clocks had the uncanny ability to tell Yuffie Kisaragi things that she most certainly did not want to know. This one flashed 5:00am in bright red digits over and over again, urging her to, "For the love of all that is Holy, drag your mangy ke-aister out of bed!"

With a resigned sigh, Yuffie obeyed, extricating her legs from tangled blankets. Another delightful day, she told herself. Just another delightful day.

Perparing for the day required little conscious effort on Yuffie's part, but the shower jarred her back to reality. Lunch with Pops. Stroll to the gym. Dinner. Breakfast. Try to connive Reeve into taking her out at some future date, not for any particular reason aside from the fact the she felt certain the smell of pagoda sweat was starting to knock a few of her much needed screws loose. Cancel a talk about economics. Schedule a talk about economics. Learn how to talk about economics. Figure out how to make an ordered list.

The disadvantage of gliding through mornings was that Yuffie had forgotten to comb her hair the past few days. Her thumb got caught in a jumbled rat's nest, and she swore loudly.

"Alright, Miss Kisaragi?" she heard her overtly nosey attendant call through the door.

"Yeah, yeah. Just a faulty brush."

"What?"

"I'm using the same brush the Mirage monster uses! Now, go. Be of use to someone not me." Yuffie heard nothing, but realized, without having to check, that the rather pudgy mother-in-law-type probably had not budged unless it was to gain a better vantage point from which to watch Yuffie's bathroom door.

Trying not to get annoyed, Yuffie rushed quickly through the rest of her routine, opened the bathroom to slide out, closed it again promptly, and grabbed a hair comb instead.

"Miss Kisaragi?"

Yuffie ignored her this time, raked the comb through her mussed hair—a few teeth broke off with a snap and bounced off her cheeks, prompting another bout of swearing—put it down, and once more resumed her jaunt out the bathroom door.

"Miss Kisaragi?" the attendant asked again.

"For the love of Da Chao, don't _you know any other words_?" Yuffie rolled her eyes.

The attendant said nothing, but Yuffie noticed a subtle downturn on the right corner of her mouth.

"Is there something I shouldn't forget today?" Yuffie asked. She looked around, trying to find something new and interesting about her hallway. She had been bored with it since she first remembered seeing it—when she was three—and wished her father would at least let her paint it something other than white. The only mildly interesting thing was the red carpet that lined the center of the hallway. Or, at least, it had once been red. Yuffie realized that it now resembled the skinned hide of a very dirty St. Bernard.

"Just lunch with Lord Godo," the woman said. Her voice, Yuffie thought uncharitably, was about as boring as the hallway. Would it kill her to have some emotion?

"How about breakfast?"

"Well, I was thinking I could talk to you before breakfast—"

"Oh noooooo…" Yuffie groaned. "Is this about your daughter again?"

"Well, yes," the attendant said. "I was hoping you could talk some sense into her. She's boarded herself up in that little house with that boyfriend of hers, and it's unseemly. What kind of boyfriend forces a girl to choose between him and her parents?"

Yuffie Kisaragi huffed. It was unfair for the attendant to constantly burden her with her family problems. The attendant insisted that Yuffie might be able to persuade her daughter away from one boyfriend or the next because the fifteen year-old girl "greatly respected The Great Ninja Yuffie," but as far as Yuffie could tell, the only thing that the she ever took from Yuffie's heart-to-hearts was that there were other boys out there. She would dump whichever one her mother thought was a bad influence at the time, only to run into another's arms.

Really, Yuffie thought, how did a fifteen year-old girl find so many boys in Wutai? Yuffie had never even had a date. And these boys, sure there were a few seditious characters and drug addicts among them, but they weren't all bad.

"Why are you always asking me again, Leona?" Yuffie asked with a sigh. "It's not like I have any experience with boys or listening to reason."

"That's why she listens to you, I think," Leona insisted, trying to stand tall on feet too small for her body. "You're objective."

That was one way of putting it.

"Fine." Yuffie sighed. "I'll go track her down after lunch with Godo. Can I go to the gym now?"

"Oh, thank you, Miss Kisaragi!" Leona gushed, her tiny black eyes watering with gratitude. "I'm really worried this time. I know you think I over-react, but this is so much worse. I can tell!"

Which, of course, was something the woman always said.

"Sure, sure," Yuffie dismissed, edging away from the gushing attendant and down the narrow hall toward the door.

Occasionally one can break a promise to one's father for a legitimate reason. One such reason might be breaking your back, or losing your way in a snow storm, or, as Yuffie's case stood, the sound of a screaming girl heard over treetops on the path toward said father's pagoda.

After having worked up a modest lather running at the gym, Yuffie had decided to take her time walking to lunch with her father rather than engage in some other time-consuming activity. The new trees that lined the path to the pagoda left Yuffie in the mood for reminiscing and considering her future all at once.

Greenery settled her mind comfortably, making her think of investing time in a comfortable intellectual pursuit for a change. Traveling and saving the world had left her little time to exercise mental faculties, and the thought of 'economics,' of all things, had snuck up on her this morning. Now, math probably was not her forte, but maybe she could be a philosopher or a novelist or a painter or a scientist! Yeah. A scientist! That was nice and intellectual. Nevermind about the math. She'd figure that out later.

Birds squawked, greeting the spring morning with renewed eagerness and bright optimism to properly complement Yuffie's more-than-likely-pointless train of thought. An appropriate finch song lulled her into a pacified state as her mind broached the possibility of investing her energy into theatre.

When it seemed that the forest itself had emitted a shrill shriek, Yuffie felt herself nearly topple forward in alarm. The next scream, then, actually righted her. With a start, Yuffie thundered after it. Traveling with AVALANCHE and working at the WRO had taught her mind to pinpoint sounds—threatening sounds in particular.

She directed her motion to a small hutch she knew stood on the outskirts of the forest. The sounds had produced a picture of it in her mind. The white paper walls stood tall, protected by the over-arching branches of bonsai trees.

Yuffie's mind clenched and unclenched around the image. Trees would part a moment only to reveal more trees. All of her training and practice at careening blindly and swiftly had not prepared her for how long this forest had become. After a few more bursts of terror erupting and growing louder, Yuffie felt cold. The screams definitely came from a girl about her age. For the love of all that is holy, what would anyone want to hurt a girl like her for? Sure, she could be annoying, but to make her scream, she thought, seemed a bit much.

Where had all these trees come from? She swore she could not remember passing them on the way up the path before. Thankfully, the screams seemed too like the trees. They continued and would not stop. Don't stop screaming, Kid, Yuffie thought, don't stop.

Yuffie's foot caught an awkwardly placed tree root, sending her sprawling face down in the earth. She felt flecks of grit weave between her teeth, making her mouth dry and uncomfortable. Traction on the ground rubbed her chin raw. Her hand ran across the scrape, pulling away drops of red blood. Swearing, Yuffie scrambled back to her feet.

The sudden still quiet in the air made her freeze mid-scramble. The screaming had stopped.

With a mechanical numbness, The Great Kisaragi wiped her hands on her thighs, leaving palm-shaped red stains on her khaki shorts. She would have noticed and stopped herself under any other circumstances. She would have berated herself for staining a perfectly good pair of shorts—no matter how tattered and dusty—but all she could think about was the sudden intensity of the silence squeezing around her skull.

Quickly, without bothering to check her footing, Yuffie lumbered forward. Her surroundings suddenly seemed loud. The finch song turned into embarrassed squawking. The smooth stones under her feet sounded like pieces of her feet breaking off. Her chest hammered in her ribs like pressured bullets of shower water in the morning.

And suddenly, the forest seemed too short.

When the foliage cleared a straight path toward the white paper house, Yuffie wished that there had been more trees. She wished that she would have arrived later still. She thought that, if Da Chao were truly a loving god, she would never get there at all. If she could not come before the screaming had stopped, she should get lost in the trees and never break free again.

What was the point of struggling against something that had already happened?

Yet she kept walking, nearly running. She stumbled more than when she had been traveling urgently, with the weight of the screams spurring her forward like swift kicks to her rear end. She wanted those screams to start up again, to make her fall and taste the minerals.

Maybe she's just unconscious? But Yuffie cut herself off, for it led to contemplating the implications of the sound she did not hear. New scents assailed her nostrils. Fresh metal. Paint? Salt. Saline. And something too sweet and too repulsive to characterize until she saw it, streaked across the front door.

How many times had she thought of that color red that day? The digits on the clock. The old rug in the hall. She ticked off the obvious ones in her head. But neither of those seemed to specifically match except for the hand-shaped prints on her shorts, the red that still trickled from her chin. But the red that painted the door could not be the same exact red as the red on Yuffie's chin because Yuffie's chin had been lost in the forest when this particular red had been smeared across this particular door.

No, the Kisaragi girl thought as she approached the door, she had had nothing to do with that red. But the tightening of her fist promised that soon, very soon, she would.


	2. Reeve's Account: Part I

**Reeve's Account of the First Two Months: Part I**

On the matter of the events of May twenty seventh, one could confirm little. It took forensics specialists four days to identify the bodies of two dismembered individuals. The fifteen year old girl, Ishwara Florette, daughter of Leona Florette, forensics said, died moments before the boy, Kage Sven, suffered his first laceration. Conclusively, the same specialists determined that the wounds caused to Miss Florette had been entirely inflicted by a sharpened metal weapon of some sort: either a shuriken, knife, or short sword.

As for how the same inflictions came to exist precisely as they had on Florette upon the body of Sven, Yuffie Kisaragi, discovered on scene covered in the blood of both victims, refused to comment. It is said that Lord Godo Kisaragi has sent Miss Kisaragi abroad for medical treatment…

That, it seemed, was all that the Wutainese officials were prepared to report on the joint case of Florette and Sven. Rather than sending his daughter away for medical treatment, however, Godo sent Kisaragi to her nearest non-familial relation residing in Rocket Town under the name Cid Highwind, where she remained for the next four months.

But neither official statements nor private records capture the contents of those four months. Cid Highwind himself could not deliver a complete account. Yuffie Kisaragi spent the majority of her four month stay in Rocket Town under the joint care of Messrs. Reeve Tuetsi, Vincent Valentine, and Red XIII, the first of whom was kind enough to provide the following description of the first two months.

* * *

I received a call at six o'clock am on Sunday, June seventeenth from Cid Highwind. Assuming it of urgent importance, as Mr. Highwind generally keeps 3 o'clock for my six, and happens to be a man who enjoys his sleep as much as I do, I hurried to answer my PHS.

His ragged voice informed me that he had been drinking heavily, and his slurred speech contained a few more bursts of foul language than was normal even for him. He told me that Yuffie Kisaragi was taking a leave of absence from work and to "leave it to me and Red. We'll nip this bitch in the bag before it knows it's been fucked with," which made very little sense to me but, not being one to challenge Cid Highwind on scant amounts of sleep, I retired immediately, brushing the conversation aside.

When I arose at eight o'clock only two hours later, I realized that I should have given the matter more consideration. For one thing, why would Cid Highwind's word count properly for Yuffie's leave of absence? What purpose did she have in Rocket Town, and what was Nanaki's involvement?

I recalled that Cid had sounded impaired upon delivering his message, and so decided to wait until Yuffie Kisaragi reported in that day and ask her.

The more I meditated on the question, the more I grew sure that I would see Miss Kisaragi sliding into my office rather clumsily within the hour, hair mussed as it had been on her most recent visits. Yet as ten o'clock, and then eleven confronted me, I grew anxious. Miss Kisaragi had a record for chronic tardiness that often left human resources in a tizzy, but generally, when she would be late to my office, she rang me on my PHS to banter until she arrived, determined to show her boss that she valued her job by berating him about his lack of social life.

I pressed the "last call" button on my PHS and waited for an answer on the other line. In a few moments, Mr. Highwind patched through.

"What d'ya want, Reeve?" he grumbled. I had a vague sense that his jaws were clenched around the end of a cigarette.

"Is Yuffie with you?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Didn't I say she was?"

"Actually, you didn't." I was unable to prevent myself from reviewing technicalities. "You just said she wouldn't be reporting to work."

"Yeah. And I also said I got it." He sucked in air through the side of his mouth.

"Got what, Cid?" I drummed my finger on my desk, letting the hollow sound calm my frustrations.

"Look, everything's fine," Cid grunted. "She's just—weird."

"Weird how?"

The pilot failed to respond. I felt my calm slowly beginning to recede.

"Highwind, if you don't start being more specific, I will step on my PHS and treck down there myself." Staring at the ceiling, I willed Cid Highwind to give me some kind of response, any kind of response!

"Well, the PHS-breaking part's kind of unnecessary, but maybe you should—come down here I mean."

"I thought you said you got it?" I mocked, irritated by his continued unwillingness to be forthcoming about the situation.

"This is tricky, Reeve," Cid sighed. "I got no idea how to deal with this, and she can't be around Red. He came up to help me, and at first I thought it was unnecessary, just to entertain her and all, but when he got here, she—look, I can't explain. Just come," he pleaded. I had never heard the crass pilot plead before. I pictured him biting through his cigarette in frustration.

"Fine, but it's a ways, and I'm swamped. If this is some sort of joke of her's, tell her I'm not laughing in advance."

"If it's a joke, Reeve, no one's laughing." Cid sighed with chagrin before the line cracked like snapped iron rail and left silence behind.

* * *

If it were anyone but Yuffie—who only caused problems for _other_ people—I would send someone else.

But it was Yuffie, and not someone else this time.

Before I left Edge, I made a point of contacting Vincent Valentine. For some reason, every time I call him, I get the distinct impression that, not only he, but his PHS, enjoys ignoring me. The sound of his phone ringing sounds exactly the same as anyone else's from my end, but I always pick up on a sense of subtle irritation when I listen for the phone to go to voicemail.

Surprisingly, however, Vincent answered—grunted, more like, but answered.

"Vincent," I said. "Cid has called me to Rocket Town. He says Yuffie's in trouble there. I thought you might want to accompany me."

A long pause. "What is Yuffie doing in Rocket Town?"

I cursed Cid and his crippling inability to provide information. "I don't know," I replied. I could hear Vincent's even breathing on the other end, unmoved.

"You're going because Cid asked you?" Though his voice came through the line with a hint of admonishment, he did not sound at all surprised. I wondered what opinion he must have of me to find my sudden burst of spontaneity entirely within the realms of possibility.

Well, since he bothered to ask. "I think he's serious, and I think you should come with me."

"I'm busy, Reeve."

What did he think I did, I had half of a mind to ask, bake cakes in my office? "So am I, but I really—"

"If it is not cleared up before the end of the month, I will come down," he clipped.

He hung up before I could argue.

* * *

I surveyed my work room in defeat. I had placed a few engineer's conveniences in my suitcase in preparation for my trip to Rocket Town; I never traveled far without a work ready model of my favorite invention, Cait Sith, a makeshift motor, or a spool of electrical cable.

Dust decorated neglected equipment, critiquing my absence from the laboratory. I had been saving up, bruising through paperwork in order to take a week off to tend to my inventions, but it would seem that the leave of absence I now had scheduled would put an indefinite hold on such plans. I repeated to myself over and over again that Yuffie's well-being mattered far more to me than material objects, but a stack of intriguing motherboards procured from the remains of the Shinra main computer system made my assertions sound rather hollow.

I entertained an immense sense of foreboding as I collected my things for departure. Cid had failed to describe the current state of events properly, so I imagined all types of disaster. Perhaps Yuffie had grown an extra arm, or lost her eyes, but Cid could have explained either of those things to me.

I left Shelke and the secretary, whose friendship and trust I had carefully cultivated over the years, in charge of my affairs. With utmost confidence that the WRO would rest in the cradle of fully capable minds, I headed to Rocket Town.

* * *

So much dust collected on the neglected white picketing of Highwind's front yard that it put my work room to shame. I rolled my eyes, realizing that neither Cid nor Shera Highwind would have time to separate themselves from science and the great frontier in order to keep up appearances.

Amused by the front gates, I nearly tripped over Nanaki when I tried to open them. The great red beast glowered at me when I noticed, his gaze as intense as the tinge of his fur.

"I apologize, Nanaki." I chuckled.

Nanaki raised himself on his haunches, shaking out the tension in his hackles as he stood. "Cid didn't tell me you were coming." His voice always reminded me of the low hiss of a broken car radiator.

I decided that my chances of getting a suitable answer improved significantly when I directed my questions toward Nanaki rather than Cid. "What's going on? Cid would not tell me anything."

Chagrin curled his lips. "It's hard to say, Reeve," he assented after a moment. "Yuffie's still Yuffie, but something's happened to her. She's different, and she won't stand to be around me."

"Won't stand to be around you?" I asked, incredulous. I remembered a specific incident in which Yuffie had chased Nanaki all over the long rickety spires of Cosmo Canyon in an attempt to extinguish the flame at the end of his tail.

He shook his head as if this closed the matter. "She doesn't seem to remember anything about the day before she got here. And she has—moments. Lord Godo dropped her here, said she needed to be safe for a while. He didn't tell Cid why. You better just go in, Reeve. She'll want to see you."

I had grown tired of all of the cryptic nonsense, but I conceded. Careful not to tumble over Red XIII as I navigated Cid's scrap metal-infested front lawn, I brushed toward the house. I wondered, if Yuffie could not stand to be near Red XIII at the moment, why he remained. Rather than punish myself with yet another unanswered question, I decided to ask him.

"I'm keeping watch," he answered, not bothering to meet my gaze when I glanced over my shoulder at his tired body.

"For what?" Why was it so difficult for people to make the extra logical step in the conversation without me making it for them?

"I don't know," he confessed in a voice so weary that I felt guilty for getting frustrated with him. "But I hope it doesn't come."

* * *

The first sound that greeted my ears when I entered Cid Highwind's home, sounded so typical of Yuffie, that, for a moment, I forgot that I was supposed to be searching for something that would explain this sudden madness.

A large and expensive-sounding object had toppled, most likely shattering, in the other room.

"Gaawd, Cid! You should get a more durable China set. That one breaks too easily."

Followed by a stream of obscenities.

"'Snot my fault Shera's got no sense," the young voice chimed. "I'll take good 'ol plasticware over that chintzy junk any day of the month!"

"Cid?" I asked nervously, afraid that perhaps I was missing something, and Yuffie Kisaragi the seven-headed monster would appear as soon as I called. "Is this a bad time?"

"Reeve?" The older man sounded elated in a way that made me exceptionally anxious. A scramble ensued from the hidden room, and soon both man and girl flocked from the narrow sideway.

"Whatcha' doin' Reeve?" My face hurt just watching the corners of her mouth stretch. "Come ta' keep me company in my confinement?"

"Confinement?" For all intents and purposes, she appeared precisely as I had envisioned her only two days prior when I had waited patiently for her to flounce into my office and unscramble Cid's incoherent early morning PHS call. Her hair mussed over her face, her shirt on backwards.

"Yep." She nodded in a feigned attempt to appear exhausted, when more than likely she had been enjoying her stay with Cid Highwind and the ensuing ulcer that it would cause him. "Couldn't come ta' work. Pops won't say why, but I gotta' stay away from home too. Some politics and all that. So I stay put."

But there was something…

"Since when did Yuffie Kisaragi listen to Lord Godo?" I asked in good humor.

"Since it gives me an excuse to take a break." I watched her wander over to the worn green armchair—stuffing bursting from slits that looks suspiciously as if they had been caused by a shuriken—and flop herself down upon it. "The work thing though—I'd do that if it weren't for Pops. He looked kind of terrified, ya' know?"

"Terrified?"

I heard Cid take in a breath, and though he was outside of my peripheral vision, I felt the atmosphere stiffen to the right of me.

Yuffie, however, merely looked perplexed. She dropped the broad grin from her face and crinkled her forehead. Her cheeks dimpled. Her chin turned in on itself when she began to frown. "I don't got the faintest." She shrugged. "Weird, huh? Not a problem though. I'll get it sorted when I'm bored o' this dump."

I had not paid any proper attention to the flickering behind her eyes. The pupils darted rapidly as she considered something apparent only to her. The grey had darkened. I remembered that, when I had last seen her, the light behind them had shown through more brightly than the color that covered it. Now the light dimmed: a horizon clouded over by pollution in the Midgar skies.

"Reeve?" Cid's crass voice startled me. "Can I talk to you a minute?"

The short walk space led us to a room that I could only presume Shera slept in. Posters and whiteboards cluttered with sprawling mathematical equations splotched the walls. With a nostalgic sigh, I turned my gaze away from an interesting proof and settled my eyes upon a far less visually appealing sight: Cid, unshaved with the stub of a singed cigarette only just jutting from his mouth.

"Sorry to do this to you, but I can't watch her twenty four hours out of every goddamned day," Cid grumbled, sounding ashamed. "And you know. Cloud and Vincent never pick up their damn phones, Tifa's already got two kids to watch, and Hell if I want to deal with Mr.-Too-Sexy-for-a-Sailor's-Uniform."

"I'll be sure to pass on the fact that you find Mr. Wallace's sex appeal threatening," I hissed through taut lips. Because apparently two kids provide a much greater challenge than an entire planet.

"C'mon Reeve," Cid pleaded. His eyes twinkled in a manner eerily reminiscent of a rabbit cornered by an exceptionally hungry fox. "Don't be that way."

"Why does Yuffie even need watching? She seems exactly the same as I remembered her, and no one was keeping her under surveillance before."

Highwind's cigarette nearly fell from his gaping mouth. "You mean you didn't notice there was something different?"

"No," I grumbled, just to express my level of frustration. "I saw absolutely nothing that I have not already come to expect from Yuffie Kisaragi."

I watched the end of the cigarette weave around a clamped jaw as Cid considered this. The stench of burning tobacco always had a dizzying effect on me. "Well, even if you don't know what I'm talking about, you will. And there's also a possibility that Godo has her hidden here from something. You don't want to leave the girl unguarded, do you?"

"I'm not exactly in the best shape for a fight, Cid." I tried not to think about the flabby excess skin that seemed rather fond of collecting around my mid-section as I said this. "Remember?"

"Well it goes without saying that you brought that mangy toy of yours," Cid grumbled. "He'll do."

"I wish you would start filling me in on some of the details." I turned my eyes down in an effort to avoid the helpless feeling his childlike desperation caused in me. "I came all the way out here and leave my job and all of Edge's reconstruction on hold."

The pilot relented, gnawing on what now remained of the cigarette filter. His shoulders rolled forward in defeat. "It's still hard to explain." He sounded apologetic enough that I forgave him.

"Red XIII says that she can't stand to be around him?"

"You could say that." The Pilot cringed, scrunching his eyes shut. "Every time she sees him she starts shaking and screaming like she just woke up from a one-night stand with Jenova," Cid grumbled. "She gets that way when she isn't around Red too, but that's the only one we've been able to predict."

"Shaking and screaming?" I tried to keep the skepticism from my voice, but I probably failed.

"Yeah. Like I said, you can't explain these things unless you see them. And I kind of don't want to repeat it just for shits and giggles." Cid hesitated. "There are other things too."

"Other things?" I raised an eyebrow. I was still trying to reconcile the Yuffie who, for all intents in purposes looked like she'd gotten a new pair of contacts, but was otherwise still Yuffie, with something that shook and screamed.

"She has these moments," Cid sighed, "where she does the same thing over and over again in one minute. Like she forgot she already did it, but that's impossible, right? One minute? And some things she can't forget having done. Like pulling the book down from the shelf and putting it back and doing that same damn thing again sixteen times in five minutes, right?" As he spoke, he wrung his hands.

"Cid," I said, cupping my hands on my forehead, "what are you talking about?"

"I'm no doctor, Reeve, but this shit ain't right."

I had made preparations for an extended stay in Rocket Town. What harm would making my own assessment do? If I determined that Cid and Red XIII had only over-reacted, I would leave within the week. The thought sounded plausible enough to cool the fizzing irrational anger in my head. If they would not provide more details, I would.

A tiny tinkling of china, followed by a monumental crash, interrupted my resolution.

"Whoops!" the cheerful voice called.

Cid swore again, this time with unrivaled vehemence. Quickly, I clutched at his left arm before he made to leave the room. With an insistent tug, I kept him standing.

"Wait," I said, and, before he could respond, "you have two weeks to convince me."

With that, I released the captain's arm, and the two of us left Shera's cosy science sanctuary to meet carpeted china wreckage.

* * *

For the first week and one half, Yuffie Kisaragi behaved exactly as she always had: rambunctious, joyful, reckless. She got bored and stacked large books on top of one another in an effort to create a replica of her father's pagoda. She sang the Shinra SOLDIER marching song in a voice so grating that I had to bite my tongue to keep myself form scraping the enamel off of my teeth. Unable to find my materia collection, she colored pale grey rocks blue and yellow and stashed them under my mattress, only to remove them again shortly after, skipping through the house in delight. She prattled on to me about the 'really sweet new moves' she was learning with her shuriken. She even tripped over the shrapnel in Cid's backyard in an effort to practice her jujitsu.

Yet the more I watched her, and the more she acted like—well—Yuffie Kisaragi, the more I failed to shake the sensation that something had gone wrong. Her movements seemed more rigid, controlled, as if, despite her externally destructive antics, she were trying to avoid breaking something inside of her. It distracted me from the paperwork my secretary faxed me daily.

I would prepare my morning cup of coffee and curl comfortably up around a floor table that had been piled high with engineering books on the first day I arrived. It was there that I would day dream about my inventions and place my faxes for perusing and signing.

Yet, as soon as Yuffie awoke two to four hours after I had settled in for the morning, I found myself unable to return my attention to my own affairs. At times, she would steal whatever contract I professed to be working on in an attempt to liberate it permanently from my attention. Normally I stopped her, and she would shove herself away from the floor table sulking and gathering the remnants of her wounded pride in order to find some more of Cid's possessions to modify.

One morning, however, she succeeded.

This particular document contained a proposed contract with the Edge Environmental Conservation Project: an effort to set up a modest ten acre park in the center of the city. A green crest emblazoned the front page, and deep chocolate script sprawled above the three shield prongs.

In an instant, I did not properly recognize the young ninja who sat across from me. Before, upon pilfering the item, Yuffie's face lit. Yet as soon as she managed to remove the document from my reach, the smile fell. Her lips tightened. I felt, not as if she were frowning, but rather that she had lost her mouth, and no longer remembered how to use it to express herself. Her eyes looked like the stones she painted to look like materia.

She lifted the first page of the document, holding it to her face, and then lowered the top page carefully. Without changing her posture or blinking her eyes, she repeated the process.

Then again.

"Yuffie?" I whispered, afraid of her stiff stance, the dangerous way in which her neck hung in a sharp angle over the page. The rest of her body straightened.

She did not appear as if she had heard me when I called to her. With another slow movement, she lifted the front page and pressed it down. Her eyes fixed on the green logo at the top of the packet even as the flurry of the front page obscured it from her sight.

She proceeded in this manner for a solid three minutes. I sat, waiting patiently for something to happen. I expected an explosion, an outburst, a fall. But just as stiffly, at the end of those three minutes, she raised her face to me. I felt her empty eyes look through my head in the same way that they had looked through the turning of the page. I wondered what she could have seen in that logo, and if she still saw it branded behind her eyes.

Yuffie Kisaragi replaced the document on the flat table, never allowing her gaze to waver from my face, or whatever she saw instead. Then she turned abruptly and walked, her legs still stiff, toward the guest room Cid had prepared for her.

I forced myself from the table and scrambled to follow her. I kept my hands from jerking the door from its hinges when I turned the knob.

A gasp caught in my throat as I surveyed the interior. My eyes swallowed the color on the walls. Yuffie, I guessed, had taken a few liberties with Cid Highwind's hospitality and endeavored to repaint almost everything. Yellow and blue cascaded in rivulets. Some of the paintings had tasted the harsh criticism of Yuffie's fuscia. The bedspread puffed with an air of freshly bought, speckled with black, teal, and violet.

The color left a sensation of over-whelming fake jubilance. My eyes went dry; my nose hairs stood erect inside of my nostrils. The room reeked of fresh paint. So much bright color left my skull feeling tight. Even the side chair—also new, I supposed—offended me with its persistently vibrant orange seat cushion and tangerine plastic.

What I found most worrisome about the colors in Yuffie's room, however, was not the fact that there were so many different colors, but that her favorite earthy greens, tans, and blacks had no representation—at least in regards to interior decorating. The only dull colors in the room clung to her body nestled on top of the bedspread.

I approached her. When I got close enough, I could tell that her eyes—still empty of anything but opaque grey—pointed toward the ceiling above.

"Yuffie?" I asked, not expecting an answer. When I received none, I followed her eyes. I felt my legs go numb when I recognized the color she had plastered upon the ceiling: dark green, the same as the color of the EECP logo. Even the light fixtures had been painted over. I wondered how eerie this room must look at night when the light no longer trickled through the windows, and the only means by which to see rained through green filters.

"Yuffie?" I asked again. My knees gave; I floated into the tangerine side chair.

Tearing my gaze from the ceiling, I looked to her again. Her eyes, her body had not moved. I said nothing.

I craved the charts and electrical wires of my workroom now more than ever. There, things made logical sense. Here, if I wanted to understand anything, I would have to understand Yuffie Kisaragi.

No one could do that.

* * *

The night drifted away uneventfully. I did not even notice the moment when Yuffie's eyes finally closed, but the moment when she opened them again blazed as brightly as any other moment with Kisaragi; she leapt from bed and flitted over to me, demanding to know if I stole her materia.

She decided that an adequate punishment would be no paper work for the remainder of the daylight, to which I did not object; I decided I could not bring myself to read small simple words, let alone make a coherent decision involving large sums of donation money. Yuffie Kisaragi had exhausted me more by doing nothing than she ever could by dragging me around Cid's back yard searching for 'buried treasure,' which she proceeded to do for the rest of the day.

Similar episodes occurred throughout the next one and one half weeks. A few days after she had encountered the EECB logo, I told a rather innocuous joke about her possessing a latent capacity for scientific prowess. She burst into hysterical fits of giggling which I could not calm her down from for several hours, at which point her eyes shown red and bleary, and she had begun hiccupping in great gasps. She then proceeded to cry herself to sleep with her arms wrapped tightly around the leg of one of Shera's rocking chairs.

The next week, her distracted behavior grew more violent in character. During a rare incident in which Cid had stopped home for the night instead of sleeping in his space ship with Shera and their respective responsibilities, he asked me how Yuffie had been getting along. In a lapse of foresight for which I later soundly cursed myself, I recounted the two previous episodes with Yuffie herself present and in the room. When I got to describing the green ceiling of her room, I heard a loud dull scraping, followed by a deep, smack. Highwind and I turned around to notice that Yuffie had heaved the floor table against the wall, leaving a tiny black cave-in behind.

In a moment, Yuffie's twisted, hungry facial expression cleared, leaving blank thoughtfulness behind. She shook her head, trying to reconcile something she saw with something she remembered.

"Cid," she asked finally, "how'd that hole get there?"

We could not find a voice between us.

Such antics increased in frequency for the rest of the week. She destroyed a perfectly quaint set of drinking glasses. She upended a bar stool and snapped the legs off. She uprooted the white fence in the back yard.

As a result, when the third week had passed, and the same deep grey color settled homogenously over her murky eyes, I felt the need to defend myself.

This time, I found Yuffie twisting a deep brown knob on Cid's gas stove, setting the reading to "Hi." Blowing a tangled mass of bangs from her eyes, she tore open a crinkled bag of bow-tie pasta with her thumb and forefinger before emptying the contents into a black stock-pot full of water.

Then, as she reached for the wooden spoon, disaster struck. I saw winter settle over her face, leaving her dormant inside of her shell. A tiny sense of relief filled me when she turned off the hot blue flame—at least she would not burn anything in her current stasis—before a fresh wave of discomfort and fear gripped me directly below the gut. With a careful steady left hand, she lifted the black pot by one handle.

The rest of the pot dropped from the stove, pouring the contents over her front and onto the floor. I felt hope flood away from me in the same manner as the contents of the pot, spilling down my legs and sloshing uselessly at my feet. I understood instantly why Cid had contacted me, why Red XIII still guarded the front of Highwind's residence looking forlorn and increasingly desperate.

I could not do this any longer. Not on my own at any rate. Cid retreated from responsibility into the waiting arms of his work. Red XIII upset Yuffie more than stock pots, her own behavior, poor jokes, or the color green. How convenient for them, I thought as Yuffie lowered herself to her hands and knees and proceeded to pick each morsel of wet pasta from the floor and replace it into the pot.

Did I not also have a convenient solution though? Could I not run back to Edge where, I reasoned, I had affairs very much in need of my over-sight, and, more importantly, problems I could actually solve?

My chest tightened guiltily as my eyes drifted back to Yuffie Kisaragi. At some point, someone would have to fix her, or at least try until there was nothing left to fix.

But could it be me? I didn't know about that. I stared at her and wondered what kept me from grabbing her by the narrow shoulders and shaking her until her eyes cleared again. She seemed fragile, breakable, made of the same consistency as the china she had shattered.

My eyes drifted, against my will, down the hallway toward the front door. I wanted very much to ignore its insistent pull, to banish its beckoning from my mind. The stiff mahogany seemed so strong compared to the feeble girl I had all but convinced myself I could do nothing about.

I started when I heard a sharp click emanating from the door. I thought perhaps I had gone as mad as Yuffie if I imagined the door taunting me and offering me glimpses of my freedom. The door opened wide, letting in the Sunlight of the day that had no right to dance. I heard the sound of busy Rocket Town tourists clamoring excitedly, chattering about the craft in the center of town, discussing its last trip to the stars.

I felt so convinced that the world had it in for my resolve that I failed to notice that something rather tall and rather wide obstructed the view. I knew who stood in Cid's doorway, and I felt relief wash.

Dealing with Yuffie Kisaragi required many skills that I had, but only in sparing quantities. I had only just now begun to recognize exactly how sparing. This situation required patience, stubborn perseverance, quiet observation, and a willingness to make one's self responsible for another person regardless of fault.

I had never been so ecstatic to see Vincent Valentine.


	3. Red

**Red**

Eris stood in for Harmonia. Vincent Valentine had his light-weight firearm wrapped in his hand, clenched almost as innocently as one holds a birthday present. Red violence swathed Valentine, belying his stoicism. But Yuffie Kisaragi—

"Valentine," I tried to avoid gushing, but I doubt it came out precisely the way I wanted. I replay the introductions in my head sometimes, and I wonder how desperate I must have sounded. "So good to see you."

He turned to close the door behind him. His movements always had subtlety to them; I never even heard the click of the latch. Then, just as quickly, he turned back to face me, his dramatic cape following more sluggishly, as if it were as reluctant to be here as I. But he did not seem to notice me or my greeting. Rather, his eyes slid to the girl still huddled at my feet, sorting through fragments of a disaster I doubted would ever constitute a meal.

Briskly, and without demanding an explanation for any of the behavior he observed, Vincent's long strides led him across Cid's tile floor. When he stood only a foot from the crumpled white rose, Vincent dropped a knee. "Yuffie?" he asked.

The small woman had started shaking. Pasta pieces cracked in her clammy fists, but this behavior did not seem to result from Vincent's sudden proximity. I thought it safe to say that she had not reacted to him at all.

"Why didn't you call?" I asked, only mildly affronted.

He spared me an arched eyebrow of incredulity before returning his face toward Yuffie. The amount of knowledge I sometimes thought I saw their astonished me. His red eyes bubbled, frothing to temper thoughts he never shared. He inched closer to Yuffie, who continued with rattling fingers to sift over the slimy wet floor to collect the morsels of uncooked bow tie pasta and replace them in the pan she did not seem to remember dumping them from.

Vincent lifted his right, half gloved hand. His red cape stirred as he did so, falling under Yuffie's eyes. I had expected no response from the girl. Why should I? Nothing I ever did seemed to change her when she got like this; one simply waited it out. But if I had expected a response, I would not choose the one she provided.

With a jerking motion, Yuffie pushed herself back from where she crouched, and into the wall three feet behind her. She took the iron-cast pot with her, groping one of the handles the way she groped her shuriken. When she reached a reasonable distance, and her back connected with the wall, she lobbed the cooking implement at Vincent Valentine's face.

Deftly, in a manner that made me count the number of weeks that had passed since I visited the gym, Valentine caught the cookware by the same handle Yuffie had used to toss it. With a muted clatter, bits of pale yellow pasta cascaded down around us, covering Vincent's red cloak like beading. Under normal circumstances, Yuffie probably would have laughed. Today, however, she reached for the kitchen cart next to her, topped with a foot high stack of brown china plates: Shera's favorites, naturally. Why she needed so many, I can't guess.

The bombardment began in an instant. Vincent caught about half of the dishes, letting the remainder fall to the floor, sundering with a thunderous cacophony that made Barret's baritone sound like a kitten mewling. Yet the shattering of Shera's favorite platter set had nothing on the sounds that Yuffie Kisaragi issued from her mouth. Each high-pitched squeal brought to mind a rather unfavorable combination of a screw-driver, a rock, and the pliable portions of my skull.

Wet tears streamed down her face, collecting on her collarbone. Tremors so completely possessed her body that I feared she would topple over onto the glass that sprinkled the tile floor. An uninvited image of Yuffie cackling, missing an ear and an eye, nearly sent me into the jagged mess myself.

"Call Cid," Vincent hissed, ducking as a copper tinged variant of flatware sang over his head in tune with Yuffie's shrieking.

"What?" I stared at him blankly, failing to see the connection between what I deemed closer to the end of the world than the Meteor crisis and chatting Highwind's ear off for old time's sake.

"Nevermind." Vincent sighed and reached for his PHS as he side-stepped another potentially lethal discus. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out something that looked more like a cracked and dilapidated box of mints than a PHS, but he put it to his ear anyway. I heard the all-too-familiar click of an answered PHS call as Valentine clasped another airborne plate.

"That's Yuffie," Vincent said slowly. I presumed Cid had asked something along the lines of 'what the Hell are you doing, Vince?'

A crash shuddered through the house as Yuffie heaved several plates in Vincent's direction at once.

"Plates." A dispassionate response.

Vincent rolled his eyes as he listened to what I could only guess was an extensive survey of Cid's unpublishable vocabulary. He seemed altogether disinterested in Yuffie's antics, but always managed to dodge a piece of china thrown in his direction. I envied his quick feet, hoping that Yuffie would not adjust her target.

"Just Reeve," Vincent grunted.

The squawking over the phone came nearly loud enough to drown out Yuffie's screaming.

"Red XIII you said?" Vincent asked a few moments after Cid had finished.

The sudden silence startled me, and I realized that Yuffie had run out of plates. I looked to her nervously, and her body convulsed. She curled her fists into her chest as her screams became silent sobs, and her body rocked harder still from the inside out.

Vincent's PHS call ended without an extra word.

"Calm her down," he said, ordering me in the eye of the storm. "Cid will be home soon, and I'll return after that."

Valentine's cape followed him, leaving behind a determined crimson flourish, as the man exited the Highwind establishment out the same door he came into it through.

Running a shaking hand through hair that seemed to have learned to stand high on its own, I inched out from behind the table which I had chosen as a shield. When Yuffie made no move as to respond, I placed a tentative foot forward, and then another before I kneeled beside her.

"Yuffie," I began with hesitation, "what was that about?"

She curled still inward until her knees occupied the hollows of her eye-sockets. Her sobbing continued unchecked.

Unaware of what to do, and deciding this 'too afraid to touch' thing would not hold up in the long run, I reached my arms around her and pulled her against my chest.

"Why'd you have to scream at Vincent?" I sounded distant, even to myself. "Now he won't come back, and you'll be stuck with me. You might not realize how unsavory that prospect is now, but you'll regret it tomorrow when I'm too busy to chase you around Cid's yard."

Kisaragi had stopped crying, but her body still trembled between my arms. This felt too weird, so I let her go as I sighed in defeat.

The 'pop' of the front door colliding with wall startled me back into alertness. A slurring of words I had never heard before, and would probably never hear again, polluted the unsettled quiet. I wondered what magic Vincent had worked to get Cid home so early with so few words.

The pilot's eyes scanned the scattered ceramic shards sprinkled on the floor with unparalleled—even by Yuffie's last outburst—terror. The cigarette he had held precariously between his teeth upon entering the room fell forgotten from his shocked mouth to join the wreckage. "I'm going to kill her," he breathed.

Instinctively I stood, placing myself between Cid Highwind and Yuffie Kisaragi. Of course, had Cid truly desired her death, I doubt I could have done anything to prevent the final outcome. "Cid—"

"_Please_." Cid sounded annoyed. Swiftly, his ire shifted toward the broken plates at his feet. "Do you think I could fix it with super glue?"

I did not want to laugh. This situation warranted the absolute opposite of laughter. In fact, anyone who made a joke in this moment deserved a 6 caliber to the head. I suddenly wished that Vincent would return. At least he could shoot Cid in the head.

"Shera's gonna' murder…" He sounded forlorn. "Want to help me clean up?"

Fifteen minutes later, all obvious traces of ceramic had vacated the premises, wrapped in stretch-plastic garbage bags and set beside the curb. After assuaging the concerns of Red XIII, Cid informed me that this sort of behavior characterized Yuffie's response to Nanaki's presence as well.

"Is this why you never come in to see her?" I asked him.

Red XIII lowered a worried muzzle to his front paws. His body sprawled across the front stoop, adding vibrant color to the otherwise bland Highwind front lawn. "In a manner of speaking."

After a brief pause in which I recounted the cataclysm in my head, replacing Vincent's calm composed figure with Red XIII's dejected one, I decided to tell them what I had wanted to say for over a week. "I'm thinking of leaving."

"You can't!" Cid said. He pulled his cigarette from his mouth. "Yuffie needs you here!"

"I'm not doing any good here, and I'm starting to think that maybe she needs professional help."

"Professional?" Cid looked insulted. "You mean quacks?"

"Cid," I sighed, letting my eyes wander over his hard jaw line. "I mean psychiatrists."

The pilot's blond hairs bristled.

Red XIII came to my defense before Cid could speak. "We should consider it." He cast an imploring brown eye on both of us.

"But Godo wants to keep this under wraps, Red," Cid stammered. "I mean, you're staying out here to keep guard and all, and for what if we can just dump her on complete strangers? And she's gonna' get better. She fuckin' has to get better. I'm sure you 'n' Vince can fix this, Reeve. I mean, it's Yuffie, for the sake o' all things that ain't holy. Yuffie doesn't need a goddamned psychiatrist."

A door creak interrupted our conversation. Yuffie's white face poked through the wide crack in the partially exposed front entrance.

"What's all the fuss, Reeve?" she sang.

Not wanting to prompt another episode at the sight of Red XIII or any other foreign matter that she had grown unaccustomed to on Cid's front walk, I met Yuffie at the front, extended my left arm to her left shoulder, and turned her back toward the opening.

"Not much," I began, cursing the nerves that bled into my voice. "We were just coming back inside."

"Why can't I go out front?" she moaned, stomping her foot. "It isn't like there's anything scary out there."

"We can go out back?" I offered hopefully, gripping her lower arm with my free hand and ushering her toward the green armchair. "Besides, aren't you hungry?"

"I had pasta." She pouted.

That was one way of putting it. "That did not answer my question." I gave her what I hoped was a reproving glare.

"But I want to go out front!" She flailed her arms around, trying to break from my grip. "You let Cid out front!"

"Lord Godo wants to keep you confined as much as possible in case of emergency," I lied, expecting that her father's intention had not been to entirely obstruct her access to the outside world, but I hoped it sounded plausible anyway.

"Stupid Godo." She kicked at the floor.

She bought it. I pulled my shoulders inward in silent victory. "Are you hungry Yuffie?"

Her lips twitched. "Weird," she muttered. "I guess I am." She leapt to her feet, and the armchair groaned.

I instantly wanted to stop her, but in the long run I decided a caged Yuffie could prove more difficult to deal with than a violent hysterical Yuffie, so I let her race toward the kitchen. She hummed a song all her own today; I knew this because it contained only three notes repeated over and over again in the same pattern, and, despite this, she found it absolutely fetching.

How could she be the same girl who had assaulted Vincent Valentine with dishes and pots from across the kitchen? I recalled her face, twisted in terror and anger. That last emotion I despised the most from her; I thought her capable of the most horrendous things all at once, for I had seen that same face before. She had black robes, a long thin sword, silver hair, and the burning of the world, the toppling of Midgar in her wake. A meteor sang in the back drop of an eerily clear night sky.

But I checked myself. This was Yuffie: the same girl who made her own atrocious music, who caused destruction in good humor as well as in moments of panic, who tripped over nearly everything large enough to register on a microscope, who laughed as if she had something painful lodged in her throat, and called herself 'The Great Ninja Yuffie.'

And she was 'The Great Ninja Yuffie.' I just prayed I could remember that long enough to stay.

The door creaked open again. I expected Cid, but Cid did not walk through the door.

A red hair band no longer held his hair in place. A pair of black sunglasses that reminded me of Cloud Strife entirely obscured crimson eyes. The red cape had vanished in what I considered a serious violation of the law of conservation of matter. He still wore that ridiculous claw and unnaturally pointed bronze boots. He still had his gone. He was still Vincent Valentine.

"So Cloud died, and all he left you was his really unfashionable pair of sunglasses?" Too late I remembered condemning Cid for making jokes earlier.

He grunted at me. Typical. When he started strolling toward the kitchen, however, I panicked.

"Vincent, I don't think you coming back is such a good idea," I pleaded. "She just calmed down, and I don't really feel like dealing with that again." I scrambled to stand in front of him.

"Trust me, Reeve."

I bit back the objection I knew was childish and entirely inappropriate. Of course I could trust Vincent Valentine. He had saved more than my ass upon several occasions. Just because I called him three weeks ago, and he waits until now to show up and ruin what remained of my tolerance—

He navigated around me; apparently, I made a rather poor road block. I felt no desire to follow him. Sounds of merry humming and the opening and slamming of the refrigerator door—only once a piece, thank the gods—drifted from the kitchen. I braced myself for the transformation that would reform the grating, but overall pleasant sounds into a reenactment of 'the day Bahamut ate all of the little children.'

When Yuffie's shrill voice wafted over my ears, my neck cords turn into oblong stones, but I began to laugh when I heard the content of her words.

"Vincent!" I felt like the dull, almost sallow pale colors on the walls had suddenly grown a shade or two lighter. "Heya! What's with the Spikey specks?"

Instead of turning around to personally test the safety of the kitchen space, I watched the door open yet again. This time, Cid waltzed through the door, looking like he owned the place. Which, of course, he did, but considering the fact that he was never home, how was I supposed to tell?

Not that I was bitter or anything.

"Where's Vincent?" His eyes roved, not bothering to look behind me. "Didn't you stop him?"

"You totally need to give Cloud back his outfit." Yuffie unintentionally answered Cid's question from the other room. "I mean, what will the neighbors think with him running around naked and all?"

I jerked my head over my right shoulder, indicating to Cid that we should follow her voice. The two of us walked into the kitchen, and I found myself amazed by how thoroughly we had managed to clean up the mess Yuffie had caused. Exempting the pile of brown glazed plates that no longer rested on the lower shelf of the kitchen cart, and a few half-soggy pasta shells littering the floor that I sincerely hoped no one had noticed, the room appeared unravaged.

Vincent Valentine stood in the center: a new resilient addition to the décor. Yuffie fumble over a yellow box of cheerios and a rather large blue carton of milk. But no one could mistake the fact that she looked at him straight on, a brilliant smile turning her face to plastic. She loved talking to Vincent of course; he never admonished—well, verbally in any case—and only listened. How could anyone frown when she smiled like _that_?

Then I remembered the broken plates, the pot caught in the air. Of course Vincent frowned. But what had changed? What had turned an unexpectedly horrific response into expected benine jubilance? The cape, the headband, the sunglasses…

Red XIII. Long, lank, and entirely red. Of course. How slow could I be?

"What's goin' on?" Cid grumbled.

Apparently I could be slower.

"Excuse me a minute, Yuffie," I said. "I have some business to discuss with Mr. Valentine and Mr. Highwind." Which was true, but probably not in the manner she perceived it. I felt an uncomfortable twinge settle in my stomach. Knowingly lying to one of my friends made me feel a bit like a traitor again.

"Ugh!" Yuffie grumbled, staring downcast at her bowl of steadily sogging cereal. I got the distinct impression that she wanted to knock it to the floor, and hoped sincerely that she would reconsider. "You better not have your meeting around me. I'll get all jealous, which is just unfair since you guys should be totally jealous of me."

Neither of us said anything to her as we traipsed away from the kitchen and down the short hallway to Shera's room. As soon as the door closed, both Cid Highwind and I rounded on Vincent Valentine.

"What's goin' on?" Cid repeated again, sounding, if possible, more agitated than before.

"You said yourself," Vincent answered after a few moments in which Cid nearly vomited impatience all over him. "She doesn't like red."

"And that explains—" then Highwind's eyes narrowed, scanning Vincent's new attire; his eyes came to rest wide with comprehension upon Vincent's aptly dubbed 'Spikey specks.' "Oh!"

Valentine holstered his gun—finally—and raised his right hand to his forehead, massaging his temples wearily. I got the distinct impression that he had resigned himself to the same difficult existence I had chosen three weeks ago, and felt my heart leap—for which I instantly felt rather guilty.

"How did you figure it out?" I asked Vincent finally. "You were only here five minutes—maybe five minutes."

"I've seen this before," he said, ever slow to respond. I waited for him to continue, but naturally, no one ever completes the next step in the conversation without me having to connect the dots for them.

"Where?"

"We did—things," he said, looking unhappy with his chosen noun. "In the Turks that is. Not all of us could take it." He shrugged after a while and lowered his face the floor.

A vague sensation that reminded me of trying to get into my apartment with the key to my office assaulted me. No matter how hard I tried, I could not reconcile something like 'things the Turks did thirty odd years ago' with Yuffie Kisaragi. "You think she did something like that?" I asked, miffed.

Cid laughed. He thought it was a joke. But Vincent did not make jokes—well, maybe sometimes he did, who was I to say? But I doubted he could ever bring himself to make a joke about something like this.

"Or saw something." Vincent nodded. He had his lips drawn so tightly around his mouth that I could see the veins outlined in his face, glistening deep blue with the foreign chemicals in his blood.

Highwind laughed even harder now, and I had the sudden urge to lunge at Vincent and deprive him of his Cerberus momentarily—not that I properly knew what to do with a fine piece of death like that, but I could figure it out. "Yuffie's seen a lot of shit for a girl her age." He finally calmed himself enough to say. "There's no way in Hell—"

"You're right." Vincent nodded again. "She's seen a lot, but I can't recall a single instant where she killed someone or something that couldn't fight back."

If Vincent was saying what I thought he was saying, this was way too much for me to deal with today—or any other day really—and I suddenly felt the urge to bolt to the door consume me from the inside out. Let him deal with it. He had experience with these sorts of things. But I could not run, not just yet. Reeve Tuetsi does not quit. Even when things got rough, even when I betrayed the company I had worked tirelessly with for years, I could not bring myself to quit Shinra. And Yuffie deserved far more loyalty than that.

Even Cid had nothing to say this time. Not even a titter escaped the man's cracked lips.

"What did the papers say?" Vincent asked finally.

Cryptic. Ever cryptic. "What papers?" I asked.

"Wutai," he grumbled, as if this were too obvious to waste words on. "From when her father left her here."

Oh. Those papers. Cid and I exchanged blank looks. It was like asking a Marlene of four years ago to explain why one of Tifa's bar stools had crayon-drawn pink flowers glinting on the seat.

"You did not check the papers?"

"Doing that now," I said. I scrambled toward the undone bed, straddling it to forage for my briefcase behind the headboard in Shera's quarters. Within a few moments, I had my spare laptop draped over my lap and my fingers dancing over the keypad. I felt very aware of both Valentine's and Highwind's eyes trained on me like wild animals goading a diminutive rodent. I needed new, less physically intimidating friends.

I entered 'Yuffie Kisaragi' into the search engine for one of Wutai's most prominent newspapers and narrowed the dates around the Sunday of four weeks ago, not expecting to receive anything but royal family pomp. If something truly did happen, Lord Godo would have done his best to cover all traces.

Strange, then, that I caught a lucky break. The news article with the most hits had the title 'Case of Sven and Florette Still Unresolved; Involvement of a Member of the Royal Family In Question.' I scanned the article with a strained effort to keep my response vapid, but I doubted, once again, that I succeeded: especially when I read the passage that mentioned Yuffie covered in the blood of both victims—

"You should read this," I whispered to the other men in the room. "I think this might be it."

Both men came around to the other side of the bed to look over my shoulders. It annoyed me immensely that the news men from the country that Kisaragi of all people hailed from had a penchance for brevity.

"Someone call Godo," Vincent breathed after what felt like several years. I checked my long hands for wrinkles. There were a few, but they had been there that morning.

"I have his number," Cid said. In a few moments, I heard the click of a received call.

"I'm going to try to talk to Yuffie." Vincent sighed as if he were considering upending Deep Ground again. He walked out in front of me and gave me a speculative look—or at least, what I imagined was a speculative look. Without a cape to cover his lips, I thought that it would be easier to read Valentine's emotions, but it seemed increasingly likely that he did not actually have any. "Reeve—" he began as if he had something to say, but let it fall broken and disfigured at his feet. "Just be useful."

Good. Specific. I felt especially useless, so that was going to be hard. Closing my laptop in defeat, I turned around to try to decipher yet another one-sided conversation.

"Goddamnit, Old Man!" Highwind said. "I don't give a fuck about family pride. You leave your damaged goods at my door and expect me to tolerate this shit?"

It sounded like it was going well to me.

"Just tell me what happened," he stormed, his veins growing in density around his skull. "Don't take that tone of voice with me, you old codger! I could eat that little girl of yours for—"

"Oh for God's sake, Highwind," I groaned. "Give me the PHS."

He took the PHS from his ear and dropped it into my outstretched hand.

"Thanks," I mouthed to him, though I certainly did not feel any gratitude.

"I'm sorry about that Lord Godo," I began. "Cid has a temper."

A stiff exhale blew into my ear. "Who's this?"

"Reeve Tuetsi, Yuffie's boss from the WRO," I told him. "I've been here trying to help out for three weeks." I did not bother to allow him time to digest this information before plowing onward. "I know that you're reticent about offering information, but Yuffie isn't doing so well, and we're trying to help her, so it would be very good of you to give us something. We promise to keep it in the deepest of confidence."

I hated politics, even more so when I had to employ their tactics in private situations.

"What's wrong with her?" The lord of Wutai's deep regal voice rimmed with concern, and I felt a little bit sorry for the old man. He really did love his daughter, but politics took its toll on everyone.

Suddenly, I felt a burst of sympathy for Cid Highwind and Red XIII. Who knew it could be so difficult to describe Yuffie Kisaragi's current condition over the phone? "She has—mood swings," I offered lamely. "And she doesn't remember after—" then I recalled that I was supposed to be demanding information, not providing it. After all, he owed us big. "Could you at least tell us who Florette and Sven were?"

"This doesn't leave this conversation right?" The man sounded nervous. I wondered what possibly could create such a necessity for secrecy.

I nodded before realizing he could not see me. Cid laughed. "Right," I said.

"I don't know about the boy, but Ishwara Florette was the daughter of one of my employees: Yuffie's attendant. Her mother claims that Yuffie had some sort of confidence with her—would help her pick out the good boys from the bad. But that's all she'll say. The authorities found Yuffie at the accident"—I suppressed the urge to snort inappropriately—"covered in blood. I tried talking to her about it, but she won't say anything. And she doesn't seem to even remember Leona. It was either a trial, mental hospital, or her friends, and I couldn't risk the reputation of our family with either of the first two options."

"So you dumped her?" I asked, unimpressed. I wondered how much I must have sounded like Vincent Valentine in that moment. "On us?"

"Look—it's hard enough keeping the press away without her here." Godo rose quickly to defend himself. "They're like termites in the pagoda! They're digging up all sorts of information about her mother that I tried so hard to…" He broke off, as if regretting his decision to speak so freely.

"What about Yuffie's mother?" I felt like screaming. He had to understand how unreasonable he was being. He had to comprehend that we intended no harm for Yuffie or her future. How could we? We loved her. In a way we were, all four of us, Yuffie's fathers. No girl had ever had so many useless fathers.

"There's something else." Godo avoided the question, but as long as he was still talking, I let him, not willing to force a hang up. "The Svens want revenge. It's just not safe for her anywhere but with you. I figure AVALANCHE can protect her from sight and from attack. What I said to Highwind was true; she's in danger."

I digested this information, and bracketed it off for Red XIII's use. "What about the Florette's?"

He sighed. "I don't think—I know Leona's doing her best to prevent anything. She's loyal to the Kisaragis above everything else."

"And Yuffie's mother?" I pressed again.

The Lord of Wutai's breath shuddered through the receiver. "I loved my wife," he insisted.

"I never said—" I began to protest, but he cut me off.

"I need to go," he growled. "Don't call me unless you have good news."

The click of silent machinery nearly left me deaf. I wondered if Vincent Valentine's PHS looked like Cloud had steam-rolled it with Fenrir for a reason.

"Well?" Cid demanded of me, his nostrils flaring.

"I hate politics," I grunted, pulling myself to my feet. I could not feel any of my limbs. The adrenaline rush from the call had left me empty inside. Without saying anything else, I wandered back out of Shera's room toward the kitchen. As I approached, I heard the escalation of a female voice and wondered how the papery walls riddled with holes had kept the noise out.

"Wha'd'ya mean there's something wrong with me?" she squawked.

It was so good to know that no one in this damn house could handle anything with the appropriate amount of tenderness required. I rounded the corner, peeking into the kitchen.

"Reeve!" Yuffie snapped, spotting me, "what's he talking about?"

I turned my eyes to Vincent. I noted without amusement that he wore a bowl of cheerios like a hat on his head. Milk streamed from the ceramic bowl that probably matched Shera's now drastically reduced collection of glazed brown plates. Vincent held his lips a little bit tighter than before, but expressed no other sign of displeasure.

"Yuffie, do you remember anyone named Leona Florette?" I asked, bracing myself for a similar fate.

Her eyes stretched. "Not you too!" she protested, slamming her hands on Cid's granite counter-top.

"She worked for your father," I persisted, encouraged by the fact that she at least kept her awareness.

"Like I know everyone who works for my father!" She pouted, her eyes turning dark with fury. "How am I supposed to keep track of all of those servile old ninnies?"

"Wasn't she your attendant?" Vincent turned to look at me, his jaw clenching marginally.

"What the Hell would I do with a ratty old attendant?" she complained. "What's wrong with you? That's what I want to know."

Believe me, I thought, so do I.

"Aren't you a little bit curious as to why your father sent you away?" I tried a final card.

"You should know by now that my father sends me away because he feels like it most of the time." She shrugged. "What's this got to do with something being wrong with me?"

"Do you remember throwing a pot of uncooked pasta at me?" Vincent asked.

"No," she bore her teeth at him. "But that's not a bad idea. Too bad I had flimsy bowl of cereal in my hand when you started talking crazy."

"Yuffie—" he began again.

"Not listening! Not listening!" She shoved a thin index finger in each ear and planted a broad false grin on her face, rocking her head from side to side. "I'm not listening!"

"This isn't going to work," I whispered.

"I didn't expect it to."

Looking forlorn, Cid chose this particular moment to wander into the room. He raised a brow in Yuffie's direction, but said nothing to her. "C'mon Reeve," he sighed. "We can show Vincent his room, and you can fill us in. I figure he'll get mine since I'm not around anyway."

He left the last words unsaid, but I heard them. He would be around even less in the future. He had his out. Vincent and I were stuck. But at least we were stuck together. I could not shake the distinct impression I felt that Cid Highwind refused to see how severe the situation had become. Cid is a good man, but he can be obstinate at times, and he can hold his denial tighter than Yuffie can hold onto Materia.

I turned to follow him, but Vincent remained seated, watching Yuffie as she twirled around the room, looking for a new source of sustenance now that she felt satisfied that the interrogation had ended. Her second attempt to feed herself continued to drip sluggishly from Vincent's brow. Third time's the charm?

What a deplorable phrase.

"Vincent?" I wondered if he would follow us, but the ex-Turk refused to budge.

"I know where your room is," Vincent said.

Both the pilot and I took a few moments to blink at the pair before Cid Highwind shrugged and motioned for me to follow him back to Shera's room. "I guess it's you and me, Reeve?"

"Yeah, Cid. Sure." The two of us stalked out of the room.

Before we went, however, I spared a querulous glance back to the duo still occupying the kitchen. Yuffie sat on one side of the granite counter top, munching on a blueberry-filled granola bar, chewing each bite like a wild laceration. Her eyes broiled holes in Vincent's shirt, looking new and unfaded from never having experience the rays or the Sun. Valentine returned her glare at a lower temperature, bearing his excommunication with ease, not bothering to remove the bowl of cereal, still sending milk like drool down his face.

I felt enthralled by the picture they made. Vincent never forgave anyone because he never blamed them. Yuffie never forgave anyone because she filled herself with grudges. People say that you cannot hold grudges forever, but honestly, who were 'people' and what did they know? Yuffie would not forgive Vincent Valentine for his indiscretion, but she would forget his indiscretion because she could not bear the truth right now.

And that, I thought resigned, seemed like more of a tragedy to me than broken plates could ever measure.

* * *

By morning, Vincent and Yuffie's argument had vanished, but I worried that the sweltering heat inside of the Highwind residence would coax it back out of hiding at some future date. When I awoke, I spotted Vincent crumpled in the conquered green armchair, leaning back and staring at the ceiling through his dark sunglasses. I remembered how Yuffie had stared at the green ceiling in her room and suppressed a shudder. He did not bother to acknowledge my presence, but he seemed content, so I did not think to disturb him.

With a few hours' passage, Yuffie's awoke. She vaulted from her room and into the wall beside Vincent's chair. "Guess what?" she began, and she did not stop talking, not for the next several weeks.

It startled me, at first, how expertly Vincent could handle Kisaragi's condition. He, as always, exerted exceptional patience while she prattled at him for hours about whatever occurred to her. He would not follow her around the yard as she searched for stones to color and hidden secrets to destroy, but he would watch her from a distance, leaving his hands in his pockets, and his face brewing with thoughts he refused to share. This felt natural to me, after having seen the pair of them work together in the WRO for the past few years. But what I had not expected came in the form of Valentine's immense foresight.

Unlike me, he did not see the seran-wrap that cradled Yuffie in her fragile broken states. He did not take the shoal color of her eyes as a ward against his intervention. Rather, he would grab her by her elbow and steer her away from whatever object had incited her spontaneous distress. When she grew violent, he held her in his arms, letting her beat on him with both fists until her mood subsided. If she retreated to her room to stare at her ceiling, he would sit with her, holding her hand to try to get some sort of communication across. When she broke things, he nudged her aside and cleaned them up without complaint. He told me that he had never particularly excelled at offering physical comfort, but that these situations required it.

Eventually, he started picking up on cues I doubted I could ever have observed. She had fewer outbursts because he would force himself between an object and Yuffie before they came into contact. He absconded with her paint set one afternoon and started covering objects with no particular similarities that I could discern. He colored the pewter statue of Cid's first rocket purple, the soft brown cabinets yellow, and he tossed the green armchair out with the rest of Shera's favorite plates.

Yuffie had danced delightedly about the room when she noticed, commenting on Vincent's new heightened taste in interior decorating. She then proceeded to use the rest of the blue paint to draw "robots"—personally, I felt they looked more like bulbous blobs of blue oatmeal—on his cheeks, which he allowed until she declared her masterpiece complete.

When I asked him about the matter, he said he wanted to create a safe place for her to come back to. I did not quite understand what he meant until the next morning when he approached me at my work station.

"I think," he said, "that we should let Yuffie into town."

"What?" I threw my arms wide in exasperation, knocking the fax machine from the floor table.

"She's getting bored," he explained. "It's hard to entertain her by myself."

"Then buy a bloody television!" I noted with some pleasure that I at least managed to sound as outraged as I felt.

He gave me a disapproving look that told me that the only way that would work was if we bought an interactive television that took her on wild fantasy adventures.

Well—Vincent was kind of square…

I relented with a sigh. "This sounds like an atrocious idea," I told him, but my voice sounded flimsy on a scale of cardboard proportions.

"She's getting better," he affirmed. I had a feeling that, had he removed his sunglasses, I would see a steady conviction in his eyes. "And I've gotten good at keeping her away from things that set her off."

I had to give him that. "But that's inside of Cid's house," I told him. "Rocket Town is—bigger." Wow. Points for imaginative use of adjectives. "And it's very—green." Reeve, I thought, is a lummox.

He grimaced at me. Ruddy Vincent and his ruddy grimaces. "That it is."

"And that doesn't sound like a problem to you?"

He shrugged. "Not particularly."

"I give." I chewed my lip. Yuffie did act like she was getting better, and the sooner that seemed permanent, the sooner I could leave and pretend that this whole incident had never occurred. "But if this goes wrong, Valentine—"

"Hn?" He gave me that look again.

"Goddamnit, my threats are all empty," I said. "Just don't let her go off alone."

He nodded and stood to get up to prepare his own breakfast and wait for Yuffie.

"Vincent?" I offered, dejected.

"Yes, Reeve?"

"You've still got blue paint on your face."

* * *

The first few trips to town ended in success. Yuffie returned chatting animatedly, and no incident to report. The green, I insinuated, had a more complicated bearing than I understood.

I wondered about how Red XIII felt when he watched them pass from the shadows, forced into exile, self-proclaimed protector. I know how I felt: nervous. And not just because I thought Yuffie might cause some horrific incident, but also because I reasoned that some of the Sven family could find a phone book, and who did not know the rather short list of AVALANCHE members? How long would it take them to locate us in Rocket Town if they had a mind to exact revenge?

And, oh gods, if Yuffie had killed those kids, maybe we were just fooling ourselves. Maybe she actually did belong locked up somewhere.

But time and repetition soon lulled me into complacency. Vincent and Yuffie made going into town the norm rather than the exception. Daily, they traversed not only Rocket Town, but the surrounding hills. They brought so many strange and obscure treats home that I had difficulty remembering how many shops Rocket Town actually had. I began to forget, as I so often wished that I would, that Yuffie had ever been anything other than 'The Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi.'

She still, it's true, had the occasional panic attack that Vincent could not prevent. On one occasion, after they had put away a selection of strange cuts of meat from the deli, Yuffie started pawing through a box of cereal for the hidden prize, which, unfortunately for the rest of the house, turned out to be red. Vincent had grabbed her by the shoulder and taken her to her room, where she sobbed all over the front of his no longer pristine black shirt for hours.

More than that, however, she kept her lips and ears closed when it came to discussing the incident in the news or her reason for continuing to live in Rocket Town. But I had a renewed sense of hope, persisting long after Vincent's arrival, that some day in the foreseeable future, she would feel comfortable enough to discuss it without fading away into her opaque world of obscure colors and violence or locking it away in a small steel box and chucking said box at Vincent Valentine's tall forehead. This hope left me prepared to stick it out until the resolution came.

I had never felt more convinced that a light existed on the other side of the thick layers of green paint on Yuffie's ceiling than I did in the eighth week of my stay. Yuffie Kisaragi was getting better.

I had also never been more wrong.

That said, I am afraid that I cannot go on. I hope that my testimony has not been devoid of merit.

-Reeve Tuetsi, Acting President of the WRO

-_Thanks to Valentine's Ninja for conversations about Reeve and Cid that led me to change some bits of characterization in this chapter. Your input is always appreciated._-


	4. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

**Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory**

Vincent Valentine felt stretched around an empty glass shell. He wished he could step on it, crush it, break it open.

There had to be something inside, right?

But why should that matter when he could not show it to her? Or he could, but she would not notice. Thin glass stood between his eyes and hers, but it wasn't the kind you could look through; it was the kind that made everything else hard to see.

* * *

"Viiiiinceeent!" Yuffie Kisaragi's voice always sounded the same. Her silent companion picked up on sound qualities before he picked up on content. She sounded the same when she felt depressed or ecstatic. He would not call it unique, either: lemon scented-cotton, raggedy and ill-spun. That's why, if one wanted to know Yuffie Kisaragi's mood, one had to look at her. She could hide nothing then.

If you asked Vincent Valentine to describe her face, he would probably say very little, if anything at all. When he observed the placement of her features, a collective sense of disaster muddled his mind, casting a thin acid over his concentration. Her lips either took up too little or too much of her face: drawn small on her chin like a magnet he could pluck off when she felt saddened or afraid, spread thin and sharp like a slice through her face when she embraced the morning with her usual plague-bearing euphoria.

Her eyes changed colors faster than the walls did these days. And her cheeks? Over-inflated beach balls.

"Vincent!" Yuffie repeated. Vincent shook the self-constructed quilt that dulled his ears. It persisted far too tenaciously. Yuffie Kisaragi did not often expect his input.

"Yes, Yuffie?" he asked, checking her face for stains or tiny spiderweb wrinkles of displeasure around her eyes. He satisfied himself with finding nothing but taut skin.

"Just checking to make sure you aren't rusting or something. You haven't said anything all day." Her laugh sounded like ripe strawberries sliding over barbed wire. He felt himself wince a little. Her fingers lunged for his right bicep, puncturing his muscles with her enthusiasm. "We should find a book store."

Vincent grimaced, making his lips pucker.

"Picture books, Vincent." Her smile stretched past the matted black hair around her cheeks. "I know you hate reading."

That, of course, was an unfair assessment. Vincent did not hate reading, but he disliked dueling with the words. But it was more than anyone else had ever noticed, so he accepted it without complaint.

"You know," she said, "you don't have to follow me everywhere I go, especially since you don't seem to like anything I want to do. Which is totally lame, but it's not like I can fix how boring you are or anything. So just go. Be free. Shoo shoo shoo!" She frisked her hands out in front of her.

"I'm here because I want to be." He despised repeating himself.

She snorted skeptically.

Vincent, to be sure, did not enjoy Yuffie Kisaragi's company. It was simple and rather soothing to have to talk substantially less than he did in the company of other individuals, but being around Yuffie had grown so much more complicated of late.

This imposition had begun because Vincent had a penchant for collecting obligations. Reeve knew this. Cid knew this. He knew this. Come to think of it, Yuffie, despite her grand scale obliviousness, probably even knew this. His patience kept him in good stead for the first few weeks or so.

Yet somehow, this obligation had gotten confused. When she would try to pull away, he could feel something pulling her back.

"Let's go then." She shook her head at him. "Try to keep up; I know it's hard. I pity you low-lives!" The green of rocket town only bothered her in confined spaces.

She darted under the wide orange "Highwind Books" store, named after the brash pilot who first entered space. Vincent felt oddly grateful that, in Rocket Town, he and Yuffie were two potatoes in a pot of beets: an unimpressive curiosity. Here Cid was the real celebrity; no member of AVALANCE constituted more than a shadow next to him, so Vincent and Yuffie slipped easily through the scant crowd of citizens.

Bell chimes droned more tired than cheerful when Vincent followed after her. The musky smell reminded him of candles with wicks burnt too low. Dust had only vague potency; it tickled his nostrils, but left more of a mellow sensation than something particularly distracting. Shelves lined the walls like convicts standing too close together as they waited for a gunning.

A pudgy old woman with the complexion of the sallow inside of a banana peel gurgled what Vincent assumed she intended as a greeting from behind a matching pine desk. Her heavily dyed hair stank of kerosene in winter.

Dull.

Dull he could do.

Giving the clerk what he told himself was a polite grin, Vincent let his eyes rove over the shelves until he spotted Yuffie scanning the children's section. Two other customers flanked her, but he did not notice them.

Crowded. Too much for his tastes. His shoulders ran too broad, and his gauntlet would jostle books he had no interest in disturbing. Instead, he stood from a distance, surveying his charge.

As one might expect, Yuffie did not have the patience for books. Vincent wondered absently if she would be illiterate today had she been cursed with a mind like his. She would snatch a thin volume from the shelf indiscriminately, turn the pages into a hummingbird's wings, rarely lingering on one long enough to digest its content, before she replaced the book and picked up another.

Vincent imagined that, though all the convicts stood in line for execution, all the guns trained on Yuffie for occupying the spotlight. It made sense, then, that tragedy, despite its comparatively stagnant pace, had finally caught up with her.

Dried spice cracked and crinkled, agitating the inside of his ear. Vincent turned away from Yuffie Kisaragi to identify the source of the antagonism beside him. He recognized the brown eyes of the banana-skinned shopkeeper. She had waddled over to him to inform him that he was obstructing the entrance to the throughway between the shelves of the children's section.

Yet those few moments were enough for the world to slip back into focus, and for Yuffie Kisaragi to crumple like a discarded dishrag.

An all-too-familiar screech assailed Vincent's eardrums, and his neck snapped back with astounding flexibility. Book shelves floundered when Yuffie threw herself at the tower to Vincent's right, recoiling against it and into one of the male customers who flanked her. Vincent tried to intercede between them, but before he could, he saw Yuffie's fingers curled into fork prongs around the man's neck.

And the shelf teetered back to the left.

Vincent twisted away from the bookkeeper and slunk into the uncomfortably tight space between the leaning shelves. Male screams joined Yuffie's shrieks as the man's companion roared in fright. Yuffie's eyes flattened into coins, and her lips all but vanished into her chin.

The shelf careened rightward.

A claw propelled toward the trio. Vincent Valentine wrapped his appendage around the narrow waist of Yuffie Kisaragi first, slicing into her only barely, leaving bloodless gashes on her stomach, before he thrust the rest of himself forward.

His body collided uncomfortably with Yuffie's victims, pushing them forward like a street cleaner. The four of them tumbled through the narrowing gap between convicts doomed to die. They collapsed out the other side of the throughway right before Vincent heard the swoosh-crack of split wood and the shuddering thud of masses of tomes thundering against solid ground.

Vincent Valentine only had a few moments to be conscious of the fluttering of the body struggling between his chest and his gauntlet before one final squeal—this time of agony—rent through the cakes of dust drifting in the unsettled atmosphere of the bookstore.

He saw one of the nondescript gentlemen struggling to pull himself up from the ground. Vincent knew, staring down to where his waist disappeared under the fallen bookshelf, that the man's arms would not get him very far. The other man kneeled beside the first, trying to calm his damaged and upset companion.

Valentine raised his gaze from the two struggling men—one with bruises on his neck, the other most likely deprived of at least temporary use of the lower half of his body—to the bookkeeper, terror in her eyes.

And Yuffie still would not stop struggling in his arms, hissing and sputtering out hellfire.

* * *

Vincent stood with her outside the front of the bookstore after handling inquiries and complications that filtered through his ears. Their status as guests of Cid Highwind, and the rather kind gentlemen's agreement to treat the affair like an accident as long as Vincent paid hospital expenses, managed to save Yuffie from charges and finger-pointing in the local paper. Vincent thought, after staring blankly at the thick purple gil-sized bruises on the neck of the man Yuffie had personally assaulted, that perhaps they wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Yuffie, and that arranging a meeting in a court-room would not properly accomplish this objective.

For her part, Kisaragi's face narrowed under the heavy rays of near-sunset. A new emotion that Vincent did not recognize gambled with her features, sending her eyes into awkward slants and the bridge of her nose into tilled crinkles.

"We'll go home," Vincent said.

He watched the cool lights in her eyes flicker intermittently as they walked, and imagined her rummaging through her own head like a box full of uncategorized items until she came into contact with a mirror, a silver spoon, or something else reflective, and hastily snapped the lid shut, afraid of the ugly person she saw staring back at her. Vincent knew the feeling, only he felt more inclined to stare at the image until he recognized it as himself, and never put the mirror down until his reflection changed.

It still hadn't.

The introspective man had not even bother to wonder how he could have missed the switch that turned on Yuffie's violent side. The cue had obviously been a verbal one, uttered by the man with the skin sucking bruises covering his neck. Only Vincent had not heard it because he had tuned it out, and not tuning it out would not have helped because his reaction would have been even slower.

Satisfactorily disappointed with both himself and the girl in his charge, Vincent foisted his cracked and raggedy PHS from his pocket and pressed five on speed dial with his gauntlet.

"Who are you calling?" Yuffie mumbled, her eyes travelling with her voice.

"Red XIII," Vincent said, not bothering to soften his voice.

"You call him a lot." Yuffie's brows furrowed onto each other, but Vincent did not bother to respond to her half-question.

Red XIII answered—a feat Vincent never bothered to contemplate the logistics of, but Yuffie, he was sure, had—and hung up again, signifying that he understood their intent to return home. He would vacate himself from the front lawn so that Vincent and Yuffie could enter the premises unfettered before he resumed his post like a stone guard from the old Shinra building.

Vincent Valentine had come to know Yuffie Kisaragi, he realized. But all he could do with this knowledge was keep track of colors in picture books and steer her back onto a straight line when she wavered one way or the other. When it came down to it, that amounted to nothing.

* * *

The two of them trundled through Cid's front door to find Reeve Tuetsi waiting for them on the opposite side of Shera's floor table, nursing a full cup of evening coffee.

"Mr. Valentine." Reeve breathed the awkward formality as if it belonged, when Vincent knew it did not.

"Yuffie," Vincent tried gentle again, "do you mind going to your room?"

Strangely, she submitted, disappearing. This never happened.

"Cid called," Reeve said, tracing the base of the coffee mug with an index finger. "He said there was an accident at the bookstore today, and that Yuffie was involved."

Vincent said nothing. Was it supposed to be a question?

Pop. Reeve's fist slammed against the wooden floor table. The coffee mug gave a jump of surprise, tittering with an unhappy clang. "Damnit, Vincent!"

"I know," Vincent growled.

"You know," Reeve said, his voice flat. His goatee tightened at his narrow chin, growing smaller as his displeasure expanded. "You know."

"I can't catch everything."

Reeve reached for his laptop, nestled as it often was, beside him on the floor table: as much of a companion as some men ever yearn for in life. His fingers slunk across plastic keys with an air of grace and practice that rivaled Vincent's gunmanship. "I'm sending a missive to a psychiatric clinic in Edge."

Even after Vincent pictured Yuffie Kisaragi wandering white halls alone, even after he saw the letters of the word "failure" black and clean on the ceiling, he failed to take in any of it.

"No," he said, pulling himself out of his own head.

Reeve blinked several times; his eyes slithered deeper into his skull. He had not expected denial. "What?" He stopped typing, closing the lid of his laptop to avoid distractions.

"No," Vincent repeated, clean like the letters on the ceiling.

"Vincent—"

"No."

Reeve licked his lips. "Why?"

"She doesn't belong there."

"She knocked down all the shelves in a bookstore."

"She would do that anyway." Vincent skirted the issue.

Lividness cut deeper cheek bones into the commissioner's face. "Yes, but she would remember doing it. And she broke someone's spine, didn't she?"

"Not intentionally, and it isn't broken." But Vincent's voice flailed under interrogation. He had not lied recently enough to avoid the uncomfortable grunt that followed an omission.

"What else did she do?"

"No," Vincent said again.

"For God's sake Valentine, if you won't tell me, I don't have a choice." He moved back to the laptop, intent on lifting the lid, but Vincent skid across the room. His gauntlet pressed down on the contraption, preventing Reeve from returning to his email.

"Let me," he intoned.

"No," Reeve mocked, crossing his arms like a spoiled child.

Vincent reached down with his right hand and liberated the laptop from the desk, intent on deleting the email.

Reeve practically spasmed with panic. "Put that thing down!" he insisted, drawing himself to his feet and stretching his arms out in vain for the prize.

"Yuffie stays here." Vincent fumbled with the latch on the lid.

"This isn't about you, Valentine!" Reeve's eyes twinkled. "This is about Yuffie. She isn't safe for herself or anyone else. And we can keep her hidden in Edge. I have good confidence with some of the doctors, and we can station operatives around the clinic. She'd be better off."

Vincent wanted so badly to tell him how wrong he was. He wanted to pluck the distant, pupil-less Yuffie from his mind and parade her around the room. Only this Yuffie did not parade. And his mind did not open.

"I know what you're thinking," Reeve released his posture and assumed the commanding stance of the WRO commissioner. Only Vincent resolved not to listen this time. "But Hojo isn't at that clinic, Vincent, and I—"

Vincent glowered at him.

"Fine," Reeve sighed. "Bad call. But then what is it, Vincent? Can you at least tell me that?"

No. he could not. But he tried anyway. "I cannot give up on her. That would steal her hope. If we put her in there…I can fix her."

Wrong. Yuffie did not really need him. Someone sure, but not necessarily him. So why not let her go?

Comprehension smeared across Reeve's face. "I'm surprised at you, Valentine. You're using Yuffie to absolve your guilt, and you're holding her here for it."

Vincent wanted to deny it, but he could not—not completely anyway.

"Very well. Give me back my laptop, please," Reeve insisted. Vincent complied. "Thank you," Reeve hissed, turning back around to the floor table to organize the stacks of paper that covered it.

"What are you going to do?" Vincent asked.

"I'm leaving," Reeve said, piling stacks into a briefcase he pulled from under the table. "I don't have the energy to fight anymore, but I can't watch you tear each other down. I'm leaving all the responsibility to you. May the both of us not regret it."

Vincent felt the implication rankle in his throat.

"I'll leave Cait Sith here—sans red cape—in case you change your mind and grow some sense. You can contact me through him." Reeve turned back around to face Vincent, his face singing with silent admonishment. "She needs help, Vincent. Not all of us can heal alone inside a box."

Vincent wanted to ask Reeve what he thought locking her inside of a clinic was, but the thought seemed childish and inappropriate.

After an hour, Reeve Tuetsi had repacked his minimalist belongings and unpacked Cait Sith, leaving him capeless and deactivated in the corner where the green chair had been. He strode to the door as Vincent watched.

"Goodbye, Vincent," Reeve said.

"She's getting better."

Reeve sighed, refusing to turn back again. "No, Vincent, she isn't."

Inevitably, Vincent found himself walking toward Yuffie's room. Spatterings of fuchsia and bright deep blue leaked into the passage. She lived here.

Vincent nudged the door and peered inside. He saw her, kneeling on the floor and digging under her mattress. "Yuffie."

Yuffie's fell over backward onto the floor. Her hands groped at the air as she did so. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that you can't sneak up on a ninja?"

"You have," Vincent said.

"Apparently you still haven't learned your lesson." She stood, pumping her arm in the air to congratulate herself on her quick recovery.

Then she walked toward him, almost hesitant. This struck him as odd. Yuffie never hesitated. She stopped a foot from him, kneading her fingers into raw pink fists on either side of her legs.

"Those stupid sunglasses make you look like a stuck up douche," she whined, pursing her lips. "Maybe I could just—" Her hand darted toward his face, but Vincent expected her behavior this time and caught the grasping appendage, deflecting it.

"The glasses stay," he said severely.

"_The glasses stay_," she mocked.

Vincent said nothing.

The sputtering sigh sounded like a dead car starter. "I guess you'll just have to be honest then, if you won't let me see your eyes.

"Vincent—and don't lie, because I probably won't know, but I'll feel like I do, and I'll steal all of your materia and sell it for tapestry money—" She twitched her nose uncomfortably, and Vincent waited for the question, but Yuffie continued to stall. "Gaaawd. Why is this so hard?"

Vincent wanted to ask the same question.

"Vincent, is there something wrong with me?"

And for the first time today, Vincent did not hesitate to answer a question. "Yes."

He watched her crumble, then, like he had watched meteor fall, like he had watched the tower shudder and tumble under the ire of Bahamut Zero, like he had watched the great virulent Omega topple and skid into pieces across the winter ice.

Vincent wanted to cross the space that separated them and shake her.

"Oh," Yuffie said.

"Oh," Vincent repeated, dizzy.

Without a hint of her usual awkwardness, Yuffie pushed herself to her feet. Then, without saying an extra word to Vincent Valentine, she walked around him and toward the door, her feet never faltering.

The tugging and pulling inside of him could not let her leave the room without him. He followed her to the kitchen.

She reached for a bright blue box of bow tie pasta.

"Yuffie—"

"Sh!" She jerked her hand across the top of the box, pulling the tab with a swift movement.

"But Yuffie—"

"Tomorrow, Vincent," she enunciated, emptying the contents of the box into a stock pot with sure hands.

"What?" All the colors in the room had no effect because the conversation was so surreal and black and white in Vincent's head. She had emptied a box of bleach, and not pasta, dusting the highs and the lows, leaving only an in between purgatory.

"Tell me tomorrow," she said.

He wanted to argue. She would forget, he knew. Yuffie Kisaragi had a penchance for hiding obligations the same way Vincent had the habit of collecting them. The largest factor in letting her have her night was the way her voice had sounded. Kisaragi's voice had not sounded the same.

Vincent exhaled, and Yuffie clicked on the gas stove, reigniting the colors and the smell of smoke in Cid Highwind's lonely house.


	5. Platitudes

**Platitudes**

As it happened, Yuffie Kisaragi recalled her promise in the morning. Vincent hated her when she slept, he realized, sitting in her orange chair. She used unconsciousness to hide from herself the same way she boxed things inside of her.

But when the light grew thick enough, Yuffie sat up in bed. Lips twitched. Lashes fluttered. She _knew_.

The grey haze of purgatory slipped away.

"I guess we're doing this, yes? But I want some eggs."

She trotted past him toward the kitchen, taking extra care to make each step heard. Valentine followed her. His eyes, hidden behind opaque sunglasses, watched the pin between her shoulders to find a focal point as she fried eggs over the same gas flame she had used to boil pasta—without major incident—the night before.

Plastic scraped against the Teflon pan. Yuffie swore mildly, interrupting the funeral dirge she hummed. "Scrambled it is," she groaned. "I always mess up over-easy. Can't flip worth a dang."

One of the rescued pieces of Shera's brown plate set skidded across the granite counter top.. Yuffie raised eggs to her mouth and began tossing her breakfast around her jaw with a lackluster eagerness that failed to fool Vincent Valentine.

"So," she foisted the word around a rubbery yellow egg, sending some flavor with it. "What's wrong with me, oh dooming profit?"

Vincent let her have her non-existent words like he let her have her night and her thoughts. "I don't know," he confessed, keeping his speech even.

"That's helpful." She swallowed her food. "Maybe we can start with what I did yesterday?"

Careful to pause occasionally to both formulate his thoughts and gauge Yuffie's response, Vincent began to recount the events as he remembered them. Aside from missing her mouth a few times when she tried to feed herself as she listened, Yuffie gave no indication that she even heard Vincent, or that she so much as comprehended her role in the events he outlined. When he finished, she rested her utensil on her plate.

"I knew there was something. I could remember going into the bookstore, and then I was outside. It was cold everywhere but in my chest, which was weird because the Sun was really high. Like really high. Inhaling Chocobo dung high. I couldn't figure out why you were talking to some guy with bruises and another one on a stretcher. There was _skin_ under my fingernails too." She reached her free hand up to tug on clumps of ungroomed hair congealing into knots. "What else have I been up to that I don't remember?"

"Mostly destroying Cid's house," Vincent answered. "And organizing things. You threw a pot at me, but that's about as bad as it gets."

She laughed at that, but it was a laugh for the sake of laughing, like she had waited for him to say something that might be construed as funny so she _could _laugh. "You probably deserved it."

Vincent nodded, bending his head into the space between them. "I deserve a great deal."

She lowered her hand to the table and started rolling her knuckles on it, sending hollow thunks into the air around them to keep the still sound away. Her eyes slunk away from his face, as if the wall had become too interesting to ignore. Vincent granted it was probably more attractive than he was.

"Why am I like this?" she started. "I mean, I'm a big scary ninja, and I picked fights with harmless civilians and guys with a crappy taste in eyewear. I should be running around Wutai—Gawd I miss Wutai—in a chocobo suit and giving my old man a few extra grey hairs. I'm better than this."

And she was. That was the point, wasn't it? Vincent waited for the flesh to peel back and the paint to dribble from the walls. Each passing moment of silence only made him surer that a zipper existed to pull the world down and let the havoc free.

"I don't know," he told her again.

"You're a lot of help," she mumbled, "aren't you? You must know something."

"Yuffie, I don't know if I should—"

"Please," she begged. "Vincent, tell me or I'll throw the counter at you. And this time I won't miss."

"Alright," he conceded. "But it's better if I show you this. I can't tell you what I don't know."

Yuffie provided him with an uncertain grin that pummeled him in the back as he wandered out of the kitchen toward Cid's room, where Reeve had left him a rather obnoxious article on the bed he seldom slept in.

He willed the paper to vanish, to have never been. When he flattened the page to the granite counter top and her gaze tilted to follow his claw, he reminded himself that Reeve had been right about at least one thing. She was not getting better this way, with him helping her hide what she had become from herself.

Eyes rolled once, twice over black crisp lines of text, but that was all. Twice was all it took.

It really was not fair.

Her voice cracked. Vincent heard words spill through the seams.

"Just a girl," she breathed. The words scrimped through the gaps in her teeth. "Just a girl. Just a girl. Just a girl." She pushed herself from the table, tripping over the iron legs. "Just a girl."

Vincent followed her once again, grabbing her by the shoulder as she wandered down the hall.

"I'm just a girl!" Yuffie screamed as if shot. Her knees fell from her legs, leaving her nothing to hold her up but Vincent. White fingers twined around the rim of his shirt collar, brittle and shaky. She did not care what she pulled down with her, only that she pulled down _something_. Who would want to go to Hell alone?

Ribs sticking through skin like ivory pens collided with Vincent's stomach. Her body curled into a stiff coil as he lowered himself down with her. Knees dug into his chest. Her eyes shone like black jars with nothing inside. She shook _hard_.

Eventually, the body stilled. Vincent Valentine leaned back against a white wall and marveled at how sick she had managed to make him.

If she were just a girl, he was just a monster, and this house was just a house. Blue was just blue. Red was just red. If she was just a girl, he could let her go. He could let her fall out of his arms and curl up on the cold tile floor while he walked out the front door and resolved never to come back.

Yuffie Kisaragi remained still in his lap for the rest of the day. Even when Vincent got up and paced pitiably, sat in the corner, and closed his eyes for the afternoon.

* * *

The next morning punched him in the joints, sore from the stiffness of the previous day. Vincent became so engrossed in lacing his boots at the front door that the pattering of feminine feet failed to draw his attention.

"Where are you going?"

"The hospital." Vincent straightened himself.

She did not relax at his words.

"And you didn't wake me to come with you?" she snapped.

"Yuffie, I don't think it's best," was all he could manage.

"Why?"

When he did not answer, she pressed on. "Because I can't behave myself, is that it?"

"I can't keep you from hurting yourself," he agreed without agreeing.

"That's not it—you want to keep me locked away from other _people_." She smirked. "That's the thing, isn't it, Vincent? I'm not safe for other people."

"Yuffie—"

"Don't even start, Vincent Valentine!" she snarled. "I _know_. I'll go out there, and you think the first thing I do will be to burn down a building, or disembowel some Cid Highwind fanboy. And why shouldn't I? It seems perfectly logical. And why is that?"

Vincent said nothing. But it did not matter; he had never had to before.

"Because I'm insane!" she sang, her voice cracking. "Bonkers! Mad! Don't turn around for two seconds, because Yuffie's going to summon fugging Meteor! What's that Yuffie? It's for _mother_? It's funny because I didn't even feel crazy until you told me I was. But I guess I am because I can't remember anything after that, and there are two bozos in the hospital that I can't even apologize to because, who knows, I might decide it's a good idea to finish the job."

Translation, translation, translation. Yuffie Kisaragi did not understand his reluctance to let her go with him.

"But what's the point of keeping me in here then Vincent, hm? If I'm just going to fester and whine like one of those—I don't know—buggy things—what's the point of keeping me here?

"I mean, I guess it could be a good experiment and all to see what happens when you keep people away from sunlight for too long—and I stress people because we already tried that with you, didn't we?—but what's the real point? I'll just end up ugly and flabby to boot, like one of those weird grainy black and white monsters in old movies that kills people for no real reason. They never ask the monster why it does it. Why should it matter if I'm crazy then? I bet if I were ugly, you'd just put me to death, but no. I have to be watched because I'm drop dead gorgeous." Her voice threaded up and down across the walls, dragging on the high notes. Vincent said nothing, letting her proceed through her hysterical tirade.

"Moral of the story—if you want to lock me up, don't do it here. I'll break out and make you regret it. Because I'm crazy. And if I want to live up to the crazy reputation, I better start acting crazy just for the helluvit. Run away, Vincent, and take those poor bastards with you so that Yuffie Kisaragi, the creature of the Wuitanese Lagoon, doesn't find you!"

Vincent sighed and made to step toward her, but Yuffie stomped her foot immaturely and pursed her lips at him with concentrated distaste. "_I'm not finished_."

"I think you are," Vincent said. He could not sift through anything she said to find a reason for it. What exactly had set her off?

"So you're just going to leave me here then? In this house—in this _cage_—while you deal with my problems?"

He sighed, his voice, his hair, his limbs all heavy. "If you must put it that way."

"I must," she mocked, wrinkling her nose at him. "It's in my nature to turn myself into a victim. But apparently, it's also in my nature to turn other people into victims, and I think we've gotten away from that, don't you?"

Valentine stared at the tiled floor, wanting to melt into the grit until she was done. He never did well with emotional outbursts. He had not done well with Lucrecia's, and he most certainly had not done well with Yuffie's during the Deep Ground incident. If he could just disintegrate for a few moments, he hoped that she would come back to her senses. But he deserved this because he couldn't let her go.

"Yuffie, I am sorry—" he tried to explain, but her fist collided with the wall.

"I swear to God, Vincent Valentine!" she screamed. "I swear to God."

"What?"

"One second," she said, the incinerating light persisting in her eyes. She dug her hands into khaki short pockets, tore out two balled twenty five thousand gil notes, and threw them at Vincent. He swore she looked a little disappointed that they weren't heavier when they bounced off of his chest and fluttered to the floor below him. "Give them those and my regards," she growled at him.

Vincent stared at her. "I don't know if that—"

"Just _go_." She cut him off yet again. "Just go and take the money and leave me here to rot!"

Vincent bent down to pick up the gil and turned his gaze once more to Yuffie. Her hard cheek bones challenged him to argue, to say _anything_.

"If you don't leave now I'll hate you! If you're not gone by the time I count to sixteen, so help me…"

Vincent stood still.

"One."

"Two."

Would she stop counting and forgive him?

"Screw it. I'm impatient. Ten."

With a weary sigh, Vincent turned his back on her. She did not get to twelve before he was through the door and passing Red XIII without due pause.

* * *

He gave them the money. He did not tell them where it came from.

"Thanks," the man with bruises blooming like bleeding plums on his neck mumbled, "but I already said we wouldn't press charges."

"It's for the medical expenses," Vincent answered. He took a few extra moments to look at the other man. His eyes focused in and out as he watched his companion ferret potatoes across his plate with a fork.

The lower part of the bedded man's body was done up in a lower body cast. The white plaster looked chafing and thick, making Vincent wince.

The man with the bruises noticed Vincent's involuntary reaction. "He'll walk again," he said nonchalantly. "But it isn't something that'll happen overnight."

Vincent nodded as if he understood, but really he did not. Normalcy, slow recovery times, they all shone like foreign currency to him. Sallow green bed sheets, so much white, clean, and lemon, contentedness and sluggish mornings, forks and burnt eggs, these things all made him stick out like a tank monster in the living room that no one would talk about.

"Just one thing," the man started, fiddling with the notes; Vincent realized that normal people did not just give other normal people fifty thousand gil for damages. "Was that—really Yuffie Kisaragi?"

As was expected, Vincent said nothing, and instead chose to hide behind his silence.

"We won't say anything," the man said, noticing that Vincent had begun to shut down. "I mean, I figure she's saved the world. The least I can offer her is my neck and my friend's legs for loan, but I just sort of figure I'd like to know. Since you haven't even told me your names or asked us for ours, I figure you've got something to hide. And I don't want trouble, but it's hard _not_ to recognize Yuffie Kisaragi and Vincent Valentine even in a hick Hellhole like Rocket Town."

True, Vincent pondered. Rocket Town was certainly a Hellhole.

"Maybe we started sort of badly, but you saved my life. My name's—"

"I don't want to know your name," Vincent deadpanned, as if by instinct. He had not meant it consciously, but it sounded right. He had no desire to know anyone's name.

The man looked baffled. "What?"

"I don't want to know your name." Vincent felt that perhaps he had picked up repeating himself from Yuffie. "I just don't."

"O—kay." The man wrinkled his nose. "I guess that's your prerogative, but you know, I'm just trying to be friendly about the situation. It kind of sucks, and I'm doing you a favor."

"For which I thank you."

Looking beyond insulted and failing miserably to conceal it, the man let his eyes feather to the floor. "Just as well," he muttered. "I don't really like you."

The chair scraped as Vincent pushed back in it. "I'm glad your friend will walk again." He sighed. "If you should need anything, don't hesitate to contact Cid Highwind."

He left the hospital, glad the scene had not grown personal enough for goodbyes.

* * *

Vincent could not explain the resentment he felt when he learned that the man at the bookstore would walk soon, crushed though he had been by the bookcase. He would walk, but Yuffie…

As Vincent returned to the Highwind residence, he resolved not to brush Red XIII off again.

"What's going on in there Vincent?" Red XIII asked, his brows knitting together. "Reeve would not tell me anything, and I've been considering horrible possibilities."

"I went to the hospital just now. Yuffie attacked someone."

Red XIII lowered his muzzle to the dirt walk and flicked his tail lazily behind him in contemplation. "I suspected something like that," he growled. "Where are we taking her?"

Vincent blinked several times, having more difficulty with this question than usual. "They did not press charges."

"I would think not," Red XIII grumbled, closing his good eye. "But we can't keep her here."

"You're with Reeve?" Vincent's voice sounded dead.

"With Reeve?" But it did not take Red XIII long to decipher the meaning. "That's why he left."

"I suppose you'll be leaving too?"

Red XIII shook his head, his shaggy mane swaying around his face. "No."

That was enough of that for the past three days. With a roar Vincent associated more with the Galian Beast than himself, Valentine shoved his fingers into his wild hair and stumbled up the front lawn. The rest of the world spun, mingling with Red XIII's fur, turning the violent color of his own eyes.

* * *

Rotting, Yuffie Kisaragi thought, glaring unhappily at her young spry white arms, took an awful long time. She had sat here, in Cid's ugly black chair—she'd have to fix that with the paint set Vincent had bought her before the book store, and by extension, the end of life itself—for literally _years_ and not a single skin cell showed any signs of turning green. That's what happens when you rot, right? You turn green?

Who the Hell could say? Maybe she had been looking for the wrong rot signs this whole time. After all, it was entirely possible that rotting meant that you sat in a corner and did nothing, and she had certainly been doing that. But she always figured that there would be some physical manifestation of it. Maybe your joints got all creaky? Yuffie Kisaragi flexed an elbow experimentally, letting her lower arm swing back and forth limply in the air. She _thought_ she heard a squeak, but that was probably just the squeak she made with her mouth to make sure there was one.

Well if rotting _was_ sitting still, it was dreadfully boring. She suddenly wished rather intensely that she had not behaved so dreadfully with Vincent. Because then maybe he would be here and she could ask him how to rot. Even though he could not technically rot because of all that genetic-whosa-ma-whatsists, he probably knew how. He probably knew scads of useful stuff, since he had had all those years of doing nothing but trying and failing to sleep to think about it. Come to think of it, that was awful selfish of him, not sharing and letting her babble on incoherently all the time given how much he positively _had_ to know.

Stupid selfish Vincent Valentine. Just because she told him to go, did not mean he actually had to listen to her. But he did, because he's too caught up in all of his secretssecretssecrets to recognize a cry for help the size of sixteen Barret Wallaces. Mentally, Yuffie checked herself to make sure she had not gotten that fat yet, and settled back into her attempt at rotting when she found her stomach deplorably flat.

Being insane was no fun. Sephiroth had stood in the center of Northern Crater cackling like the late Mrs. Shinra trapped in a diamond store, but all Yuffie could think about was the fact that she hated being insane and knowing it. She had been much happier being insane and not knowing it, and even just being sane. But when you were insane and knew it, your friends all gave up on you and left you to try and fail at rotting, and you _knew_ why because you knew you were insane and not worth untangling. She felt vaguely insulted. Linen shirts, for Gawd's sakes, were worth unwrinkling, but no one could bother over her.

Yuffie Kisaragi had done something horrible and atrocious, and she wished she could forget the fact that she did it—because, after all, she could not even remember _doing_ it—but it was too late. She had wanted to know, and so Vincent had told her. And she could not remember what happened after that, but she did not want to know anymore, because whatever it was, it had made him leave. And now she was all alone and feeling sorry for herself and trying to turn green and creak and get fat just to spite someone, but if no one cared, who could you spite? And _that_ was the problem: the crux of it.

But if she could not forget, and she could not fix, and she could not have _not_ done it, and she could not even rot away, Yuffie wanted to stop feeling sane.

She felt so sane it hurt to know she wasn't. She just wanted the hurt to go away.

"That's enough angst Ninja," she grumbled.

The chair spun back in kaleidoscope pattern when Yuffie shoved hard away from the granite countertop. Wanting to proclaim that 'Yes! This house is still occupied!' Yuffie stormed extra hard out to the front entryway where she'd had her last rather embarrassing—though she would never admit it—showdown with Vincent Valentine. She glared venomously at the door, the doorknob: the easy easy way out for everyone but her. If only she could get it to work for her too. She was Yuffie Kisaragi, gawdammit. Things were supposed to come easy to her, and if they did not, she would _bend them to her will until they did_.

She flounced over toward the offensive object and, without any sort of restraint, pushed _hard_ and away from Cid Highwind's house.

But then she had to check herself; she had to stop those stupid squishy tears from ruining her face again because when the door opened, she realized that it had worked—well, a little bit. Yuffie Kisaragi hated to say this, but if she could not chase the insanity, she would take the next best thing.

Vincent Valentine, still wearing those ridiculous sunglasses, and still hiding his secretssecretssecrets behind his jumpsuit and his blasé no-nonsense tight lips, stood on the other side of the door, looking just like forgiveness wrapped in inexpensive black construction paper.

He knew she was insane. She knew he knew that she was insane. And he knew that she knew that he knew that—fuck it. Vincent Valentine had come back, and Yuffie Kisaragi found that she did not feel so much like rotting anymore.

* * *

The door opened jarringly with Vincent's hand still attached to the knob, vibrating on the return ricochet. Incredulity wrapped Yuffie so thoroughly that Vincent wondered if perhaps he had accidently pulled his pants over his head instead of his legs this morning.

"You came back."

"May I come in?"

Kisaragi skittered back from the opening. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him, but refused to take his eyes from her face. Her shoulders slumped, revealing a frightened vulnerability Vincent could not recall ever having seen her wear. It was always "I'm the world's greatest ninja!" Or "Stand still while I _break your face_." Vincent faced a gentle, almost formidable timidity, an unspoken level of gratitude he could not place.

"You came back?" she repeated, but it sounded more like a question this time.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I?"

"Why would you," Yuffie's brows knit, "is a better question."

"Excuse me?" Vincent grumbled.

"I was right," she said quietly, glaring at him for hiding information from her before. "They all left because of me."

Vincent sighed, crossing the feet between them to get a better look at her eyes. Fear. Too much of it. Fear of being alone, and not being able to be alone, of never seeing Wutai again, of knowing what she had done to it.

"Maybe," he conceded, unwilling to lie, to placate that kind of fear.

"So why don't you?" she accused.

Not this again. "Because you're a friend."

"And I wasn't a friend to them?" Her eyes had the dangerous reckless flash again: the one that told him he was best off taking another walk.

"That's not—"

"I'm just saying," she grumbled. "That if they're friends and they left, what's to keep you? Guilt? You and I both know that that one hasn't done that much for you since Deep Ground."

This caught him off guard. Had she noticed that about him? Guilt used to rule him, and one should not misread, it had not fled him. Guilt hummed seductively in him. Could it be guilt? He had thought the last four years had rid him of it.

"No," he told her after several minutes, feeling only half-satisfied.

"Then why did you come back? _Why are you still here_?"

That question, Vincent thought, had no real verbal answer. Even if he had had better skills with words, he probably could not have properly provided it for her. Her mouth twisted and he could see the pan-ic pan-ic pan-ic of her heart in her chest, the sweat over her forehead, and she looked so horribly frighteningly needy that it terrified him.

Miss Yuffie Kisaragi had absolutely no business looking that fragile.

The princess of Wutai had absolutely no business whatsoever looking for all the world like a mirror in front of Vincent Valentine. But she did. So he did the only thing he knew how to do with mirrors; he fixated on her.

Without a word, Vincent Valentine leaned forward and kissed Yuffie Kisaragi.

_Revised. Everything from here on out is a minefield._


	6. Congé

_Thanks to monroeyoder-as you reviewed anonymously and I, therefore, could not get a chance to reply to you-for taking the time to share your thoughts!_

**Congé**

It did not feel like a solution. It felt like getting her face squeezed against an unyielding prickly pear cactus. It did not taste like sanity. It tasted like salt, gunpowder, and too long without a trip to the dentist. It did not sound like an answer. It sounded like the swishing of fabric, the clicking of buckling knees, and that horrible sound that was not a sound, but a silence that stung and bit at her ears worse than sleet in midwinter. It did not smell like a reassurance. It smelled like dust, coffins, regret, and the burningburningburning of sun on gravel.

Yuffie Kisaragi did not _need_ this. Yuffie Kisaragi did not _want_ this, but she dug her nimble fingers into his shoulders anyway. She swallowed his lips and struggled _hard_ not to close her eyes and lose herself because who knew what sort of self she had left to lose? Part of her recognized this secret of Vincent Valentine's. She _knew_ this part of him better than the face he wore and the stolid complete and utter pill exterior he paraded around in.

She knew it, and she wished she could share it. But there was one crucial teensy point of contention she had to settle before she could.

Could mad girls love? No, Yuffie thought, probably not—

But they could kiss back.

* * *

By the time Vincent Valentine's whirring half shape thoughts caught up with the roaring in his ears, his hands had wandered into the tangle of hair on her head, pulling her chin to his, knocking jaws into a lock without his permission.

How had he grown attached to a situation that sent Cid Highwind and Reeve Tuetsi rushing in search of some semblance of rationality? Please. Please forgive me for needing you. Please forgive me for leaving.

As one a little less addled than Vincent Valentine could have predicted, Yuffie slugged him _hard_ on his nose when he released her hair and drifted away from her.

"_That_," she griped, scraping her tongue beneath her upper jaw for emphasis, "was not an answer."

He knew.

"Watcha' have to say to that?" She demanded, freeing one of her fingers for the sole purpose of waggling it in his face.

Nothing.

"You could at least kiss me again," she mumbled somewhat hopefully.

"But I won't."

Yuffie narrowed her eyes and stood on careful tip toes to better peer into his face, as if willing to see through his sunglasses. "And _why_ is that? That dissatisfied? I'll have you know that there are loads of men in Wutai dying for a crack at these lips—and the crack, that too—and I've kissed _oodles_ of 'em. That's right, _oodles_, and they never once—"

"Yuffie," Vincent sighed patiently. "I won't kiss you again because you just hit me for doing it the first time."

The short girl tilted back on her heels deflated. "Get with the program Vincent," she beamed at him. "I didn't hit you for kissing me, I hit you for stalling—which you're still doing, I might add. So if you don't want to taste the famous Yuffie sucker punch of death—and mark, no phoenix down will get you up from this—you better start explaining."

"I'm still here," Vincent said, "because I want to be." It was all either of them would get.

And he did. He wanted to be here, not specifically in Cid Highwind's house with walls ruined by overzealous artistry and violent paper-punching outbursts, but with her. He couldn't tell anymore whether he liked the plastic wind-up Yuffie or the mirror Vincent, so he could not let go, but it was not working. _This_ was not working.

Her face cracked in half when she smiled again. "That's all you had to say!" She chimed. "So how about another kiss?"

"I don't think so," he mumbled after a pause.

"You're right." She bounded toward the kitchen. "We're moving oh so fast. How about lunch? Super duper egg time!"

She deflected him like she deflected almost everything these days. But Vincent remembered. Yuffie had always deflected. She had deflected her father tossing her out of her country as a child. So now that she deflected him should not surprised Vincent.

But it did.

Yet, when he entered the kitchen, he realized it was easier this way.

In a few extra moments, Yuffie had a pair of eggs in hand and made for the stove.

Crack. "By the way Vincent, I lied." And a whoosh of flame.

He did not ask because he knew that she would answer him anyway.

"I haven't kissed oodles of men," she confessed when she cracked the second egg and left it slumping into the pan.

"I know." She had told him before—not that he had actually wanted to know at the time.

She dropped the frying pan onto the stove with a start before rounding on him with that same violent lightning glare. "That's rather presumptuous of you!"

"Hn."

"Don't you 'hn' me Vincent Valentine," she snarled at him, her eyebrows tight. "I _know_ my kiss wasn't that bad!"

The eggs protested loudly behind her with a spick-spat-pop. She had left the stove on high.

"Just because I'm young and bouncy and, dare I mention, _annoying_, doesn't mean I don't have lots of suitors. I told you that in confidence. You should be _shocked_, shocked I say! Or at least have the grace to look mildly surprised."

The singing of eggs echoed in a cacophony behind her, almost drowning out Vincent's objection.

"Yuffie—"

She cut him off yet again. How many times had she done that over the past month or so? "But _no_, you just take your pompous broody butt and say 'I know.'" She crossed her arms and tucked in her chin in an effort to look serious and menacing.

"Yuffie—"

"And it wasn't a very good kiss either. You're being awfully arrogant over a kiss that doesn't make my top ten—and I haven't even had ten kisses! That's just sad Vince. You need to seriously re-evaluate your technique. Now where's my apology?"

The smell had started to fill the air.

"The eggs are burning," he said without a flicker of an eyebrow.

She twirled in place to inspect the food on the stove. Vincent heard the scraping noise of plastic against Teflon as Yuffie jammed the spatula under the egg to flip it again. "Huh," she said finally, "I suppose they are."

She clicked off the stove and foisted over-brown over easies onto two plates before giving Vincent a pointed look that said 'you'd better eat it if you don't want me to shave your head while you sleep,' and shoving the extra done pseudo lunch in front of him. Grudgingly, Vincent grabbed a proffered fork and complied.

He had difficulty, as he watched her fidget in her chair, maintaining his resolve to leave. But Vincent could only think of one way to help her. Vincent knew he could not do it here, in Rocket Town, locked in a house that had slowly morphed into a pit. He had to find the answers where the answers were.

Vincent had to go to Wutai, and he could not take her with him.

"Actually," Vincent heard her voice wheedle through his ears as this thought became more and more real. "It wasn't such a bad kiss."

She knew.

The rest of the day paraded forward with jerks and starts like the Tiny Bronco crossing to Wutai on an eighth of a tank of gas: chattering, bantering, catching her eyes, and wishing he would not. Words oozed sickeningly sweet black licorice, and Vincent almost found himself complacent.

When dusk settled orange and bright through the windows, she grew quieter and started to ask him questions: questions he had not been asked in a long time out of delicacy.

"What was your mom like, Vincent? I bet she had hips that could _kill_." She was at the stove again. Vincent had come to realize that she could only cook eggs—well, burn eggs would be more precise—and pasta. This time he found her at the latter.

Vincent shrugged at the mention of his mother, remembered the triple barrel shaking in thin fingers against the woman's temple, and decided not to comment.

Yuffie waggled a brow at him once she had set the pasta to boil before flouncing over to curl into the seat beside him. "Not fair, Grumpster." She reached out to shake his shoulder. He wobbled back and forth like a long-necked dead goose, far too used to it to find himself irate. "I tell you _everything_."

Almost.

"Everything."

Not quite.

"Everything."

Really, this was unnecessary.

"Everything."

"She didn't like living much," he grunted finally. He watched her eyes narrow, rolling back into her head as she tried not to think about it.

"Oh," she mumbled, shoving herself away from the table again, back toward the stock pot, though Vincent felt certain that the boil had not started and the pieces still floated uncooked and isolated from one another on the water's surface. Yuffie used a yellow ladle to stir the pot absently before, realizing her futility, she shuffled back over to the seat beside Vincent again.

He counted the moments of silence. One, two…

"Too bad," Yuffie sighed. "She had such a kick-ass son. Not that I think so, but just objectively."

Vincent shifted uncomfortably. "Yuffie…"

"Stop saying my name like that!" She growled, her eyes clouding for a moment, but only just, before the sizzling calm returned. Yuffie cooked everything on high.

"We're going to talk about you today," she insisted, crossing her thin arms. "If you have a problem with that, then you can just keep having your problem, but no complaining, or I drown you in the pasta."

Silence. Then—

"What were you up to when you came here?" Her eyes softened to the new topic. Vincent could almost see the possibilities unfurling in her mind. He was pining away from her like a rabbit in heat. He was brooding on the gondola in Gold Saucer while children poked and prodded him with a stick to see if he ever moved. He joined an a capella group—

That last thought scared him into conversation. "I was finalizing the contract to start a weapon smith in New Mideel."

Yuffie pfft-ed and blinked several times. "You mean you weren't—"

"No."

Her face cracked unnaturally again. "That's actually really spectacula-tastic. I mean, like Yuffie Ninja Greatness proportions! Only don't sell shurikens, 'cuz they'll suck if they aren't Wutainese. Just sayin'."

The squelchy sound of silence she so hated leaked through the cracks left by the disjointed boiling.

"Need a really cute clerk?" She batted her eyelids in what Vincent figured was an attempt to look seductive.

"No."

"Is it 'cuz I'm crazy?"

"It's because you're over-bearing." Though she was part right. But Vincent refused to admit that she was stuck like he was in the confines of her own head.

"I am not—"

She began to protest by default, but Vincent's sudden forward chin slump cut her off.

"_Maybe_, but that's only because my advice is the besterest."

Vincent shifted his weight and looked toward the ceiling. The white chunks flaked in places, tattered and tired. He wondered if he should paint those for her too before he left. But he decided he did not need any more excuses to stay than he already had.

"Alright," and she sounded comically exasperated. "If I admit that I'm a teensy bit excessively all-knowing where I have no real right to be, will you let me be a clerk _then_?"

Vincent stood to go check on the pasta.

Yuffie leaped from her chair and sailed through the air until she landed with a nearly over-balancing _spoink_ on his back. "Don't make me _beg_." Her feet pressed against a rather sore spot on his back which still tended to ache thirty plus years after Hojo's experiment.

"_Please_," and he could not believe the word that left her lips.

"Maybe if you let go." He choked, gripping the wall with his human hand as he tried to gulp in enough air to breathe.

A lull.

"But I kind of like it up here."

"Too bad."

Her body slithered down smoothly, more agile than he had seen her in years. She gave him a foot to breathe.

Vincent reached for the ladle by the stove and churned the pasta, sticking together in untended lumps. It was a good thing that the one sensory aspect Hojo had left untouched was his sense of taste.

"You should be honored Vincent Valentine. That's the first compromise I've ever made."

Vincent did not find it necessary to point out the fact that, if that were true, she would not still be there, in Cid's house. Instead, he fell back on the old standby—

"Hn."

"That's right." Vincent felt her smile turn into a scowl. "Talk dirty to me."

"Hn."

"Whatevs. I betcha' you would if it were in your nature. But you know what? I got this feeling that you'd talk as much as I do if you had your very own Vincent Valentine to sit with you and wait for you to pinch out each word like every five years, but you don't. And I'm way too rambunctious and important for that sort of thing. I tried, but you're a hard case Vince: a real bowl of dried up duck soup."

Valentine dropped the ladle into the simmering pot and squeaked around on the floor to face her.

As soon as he turned, she flicked him in the nose.

Quite naturally, she guffawed wildly, holding her stomach to keep it from tumbling onto the floor as she grabbed his shirt for support. A finger snaked around one of the collar buttons, pulling at it dangerously. Instead of losing a thirty year old button, he slid down after her. He sat cross-legged before her with her mottled and scarred knees shoved into his face.

"It wasn't that funny," he grumbled.

She had her eyes squeezed tight, still chuckling in her awkward broken 'nyuk, nyuk, nyuk's. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

"Your nose is so springy!" She struggled to blurt out as her hand reached dangerously toward his face again. Instead, he brushed it off and stood, returning back to the pasta.

"I think the pasta's ready."

Without enough energy to pursue the subject, Yuffie stumbled over toward her chair.

Vincent strained the pasta and set gooey clumps onto two plates. Vincent took his place beside her, forcing tasteless wads of white flour into his mouth with a silent challenge.

"Vincent," Yuffie's words came out garbled around clumps of sticky pasta. "You're a great guy and all, and I'm sure the weapon shop will be a hit, but you're no chef."

When dinner finished, Yuffie remained silent. Vincent worried a bit that the pasta paste had sealed her jaws together, but he was not about to ask. Instead, he decided to take an early turn-in and ambled off in the direction of Cid Highwind's room.

"Hey Vincent." The words stopped him. "Will you stay in my room tonight?" As if she knew he would leave.

"No," Vincent said and kept walking.

* * *

Yuffie woke up without remembering her dream. Just as well. Her dreams dragged harder than Cid on his tobacco products these days. So that did not bother her so much. But what _did_ bother her was the fact that she could swear she awoke to the feel of shaking lips on her temple. Only, she turned around and Mr. Tall Dark and Good-kisser was nowhere to be found.

Not a good sign.

She tumbled out of bed, tangled in black, blue, and purple like some reject mummy. With a glare at the swathing sheets, she wiggled forward only to collide with the closed door.

Oh good, she grumbled inwardly, doors that close. Whoever invented them had obviously never heard of Vincent Valentine. Because anyone who had heard of Vincent Valentine and his propensity for closing said doors at the most inconvenient times, would have lived in the open air in _Icicle Inn_ before inventing such a blemish on the already ugly hide of The Planet's history.

Wrenching herself free of both obstacles—and regretting the fact that she had to forego a victory pose—Yuffie bolted down the hall, through the kitchen, and toward the front entryway. What a whiff of déjà vu. Gawd.

And there he was, looking all sneaky in his sneaky sneaky shades and his sneaky sneaky black jumpsuit and his sneaky sneaky sneakyness, trying to sneak his ugly mammoth foot into his sneaky sneaky bronze boot.

He stopped. But he did not seem to possess the decency to look embarrassed. Would it have _killed_ him to look guilty? Or even to bite his lip? Or scratch his head ashamed? Or at least offer some pitiful excuse?

But no. He just stood there with his stupid foot in his stupid boot and his plaster mold face looking at Yuffie like she should not have been there. Or like she was a decoration on the wall or something. Of course, she got the mix up, because she definitely considered herself pretty enough to be a decoration on someone's wall-probably not Cid's since the man had no taste-but she behaved in a rather animated fashion, and _that _was hard to miss.

Yuffie told him already. She told him. You _cannot_, nope, impossible, absolutely, no sneaking up on ninjas!

But she digressed. She had expected this. Unfortunately. And it did not hurt as much as she thought it would. This time, the victory pose struggled and rattled in its cage until Yuffie threw that sucker in the _ocean_.

"Will you come back?" Her voice did not crack. Another victory.

"Yes."

There was something else, and she just could not resist tugging on the 'Do Not Pull' cord.

"But not for a while?"

This time, he grimaced. Actually. It kicked her in the face like a Chocobo she once surprised from behind. "Yes."

She nodded numbly, nothing to say.

"I'll call Cid and let him know that he has to come back." He resumed placing his stupid foot in his stupid boot. She felt her knees shake. She would have lectured them about not shaking if they would listen, but she knew that they wouldn't.

Instead, Yuffie wanted to tell him that she did not want Cid. She wanted to tell him that if he left now, she would let Cid's stash of tobacco and sake ruin her perfect—well, almost perfect—drugless record with reckless abandon. She wanted to tell him that she felt the crazy creeping up. She wanted to tell him that he would probably come back to a girl who did not remember her own name and a house that barely stood, crushing the grass outside, snapping the trees in twain, the Sun burning her back because she had knocked down all the closing doors with her fists.

But she didn't. She just stood there and kept nodding like an idiot.

"Yuffie…"

"Don't," she snapped. "Just shut up and leave."

She saw him hesitate, and it was almost enough.

Almost.

But then he left, the door swinging forward into a succinct click behind him, and she felt something slip away. Yet Yuffie would not be beaten by slippery things, so she grabbed it when it reached her feet, and pulled it back up. The slippery thing said she believed him.

And she did. Really.

But that did not stop Yuffie from staring at the door and trying not to hate it.

**Revised**.


	7. Death in a Clearing

**Death in a Clearing**

Evening air chilled Vincent's face. Though he narrowly avoided colliding with Red XIII, he could not have hoped to avoid him completely.

"You're leaving."

"Call Cid." Vincent increased his pace.

Before Vincent could clear the gate, Red XIII stretched out in front of him, flicking his tail accusatorily. Vincent cursed himself. He had wanted to avoid this.

"Don't do this Vincent," Red XIII said. "No one likes to wake up Reeve so early in the morning." He tossed his mane uncomfortably.

Talking to Red XIII could be pleasant, Vincent decided. But he generally disagreed with that assessment.

"Don't call Reeve." Though the request came out dead and empty as Northern Crater, Vincent reasoned it would have sounded like begging to anyone who knew him well enough.

"You'll have to give me a good reason not to. I've been willing to tolerate this because you watch her, but we _cannot_ leave her alone."

"Cid will come back," Vincent pushed. Cid did not strike him as a proponent of psychiatric clinics.

"You have to know that she will be better off with professionals. She requires constant surveillance. We have—all of us—other obligations. She's not getting better. I have been in contact with Reeve lately. He has told me that she will be given careful care and respect by people who actually know about what's happening to her: people who have seen this and have fixed this. She'll probably never get completely better. But we can't even begin—"

"And you think caging her will help?" Vincent could not listen to him continue without defending his position, however ineffectually.

Red XIII, of course, saw the flaw in his argument instantly. "We're caging her now. We can't let her out again, not after what happened."

He knew. He knew she probably had more of a chance with professionals, without him. He was selfish, that was all. Maybe Reeve had been correct. Maybe some part of him wanted to fix her himself, to atone for not being there in the first place.

Just like Lucrecia.

His life doomed, stuck on repeat. The same old tired song without a real melody or even more than one guitar riff. Like the sorrow songs of the less than liberated.

So he would do the next best thing to breaking the player. He would go back to the beginning and start over until he found a solution, until he found the notes for a new song with more than one riff. He just needed time.

"I'll make a deal," he whispered. "Give me time: a month at most. If I can find out what happened in Wutai, and I can help her, she stays. If not, I'll take her to Reeve and to Edge myself."

Pause.

"I hate it when a friend suffers and I have nothing to give but patience. You best return soon. The longer I live, the easier it is to see how fleeting patience can be."

Vincent nodded.

"Confines foster madness just as much as torture," Red XIII shuddered, the black tattoo on his hip flashing, even in the dark.

* * *

It would not kill Godo to send away the fan-wavers and the dancing girls long enough to let Vincent speak his piece, the gunman thought uncharitably, imagining the old man lying on a massive throw pillow and drinking glittering red wine to the gentle sound of an old Costa del Sol rowing song. He had to remind himself several times that Lord Godo in fact ran a country, and probably did have better things to do than sit through ill-conceived rants proffered by a delirious ex-Turk about his violently insane heir-to-the-throne.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Valentine," the guard repeated for the third time. "But Lord Godo refuses to see anyone right now."

Vincent's fingers twitched dangerously close to his gun. "Did you tell him that it's about his daughter?"

"Yes," the guard wobbled, looking ill. The sour green of his face clashed horrendously with the bright violet of his ninja gi.

"Did you tell him that I refuse to leave until he speaks with me?"

"Yes, well," and the guard looked sideways, unwilling to glance into Vincent's eyes, now free from the sunglasses he knew decreased the intimidation factor. "He told me that no one can stand still forever."

"Try me." The guard skittered backward, clutching tightly to his shuriken. The clanging of gunshot on the dusky Wutainese morning. The emotionless deadpan on the cliffs of Da Chao.

"Well, you _can't_," the guard insisted. "Technically speaking."

"I spent thirty years in a coffin," Vincent said. "I can out-wait and out-live Lord Godo if he'd prefer, but I'll wager that his people might grow suspicious if he never shows himself."

"Please don't try, Mr. Valentine," the ninja stuttered. "I don't want to call the royal guard to escort you off the premises—"

Vincent raised an incredulous eyebrow.

"That is to say," the guard hastily corrected, "only if you _won't_ leave, and I'm sure you will, but—"

_Click_. Vincent raised the cocked Cerberus to the guard's temple. He had no real intention of pulling the trigger, but the guard shuffled away anyway, muttering prayers in a hasty language Vincent recognized as Wutainese but could not properly translate.

There was just something so effective about speaking Turk.

Similar guards skittered timidly out of Vincent's way. Each of the guardians of the pagoda gave him a grateful nod, as if they had expected his arrival. He stopped on Gorki to ask a question.

"We have questions too," the man said quietly, gesturing with a short arm toward the polished red brown stairs in the adjoining corridor.

When he reached the top floor, the gold brown caught him in a whiff of old memories. He remembered watching Yuffie with a mixture of disinterest and exhaustion, unable to weave into the quick jerky movements of her limbs and the awkward slicing of the shuriken into familial skin. That story. That strife? Too old for him.

Grimoire had fixed steaming plastic goggles onto his face, observing the way his boy held the familiar triple barrel with disdain.

"That sort of thing," Vincent's father had whispered. "Kills people's mothers."

"Vincent Valentine?" The image dispelled; Vincent breathed the reedy wood smell of the pagoda and looked to Godo, propped on the flat tan-yellow of the rug. No throw pillows. No dancing ladies. Just a very large map of the world plastered over the rug with stains from soy sauce and white rice. Empty dishes ringed the room with dried grains stuck to the insides of red bowls.

The guard's statement had had some truth to it. Lord Godo had not had any visitors, not even a maid.

"Hn."

"Has something happened to Yuffie?" The man asked, hobbling to his feet, several heads shorter than Vincent.

Vincent wanted to laugh. "Something keeps happening to Yuffie."

"Oh," Lord Godo said dismissively, looking as if he wanted to tumble back to the floor and never stand again. "Did you come all this way and demoralize my sentries to tell me that?"

"I came," Vincent glared at the older man with almost—almost—unwarranted banality. "To say nothing. You're going to do the talking."

"I've already told Mr. Tuetsi everything."

"Then tell me more than everything." Vincent sounded more patient than he felt.

"I have nothing to say to you." The wrinkles around Godo's eyes twitched. He crossed his arms. Vincent noticed the uncanny similarity.

"I think you do."

"All I know is in the article that I presume you've already read."

"If that's the case, what was that about Yuffie's mother?" Vincent seethed at him disdainfully, but Godo refused to shrink back. He had more spine than his own sentries.

"I can't tell you that." Vincent's fingers itched for his Cerberus again, but then Godo reopened his mouth. "But I can point you in the direction of more information on the events. I—don't think poorly of me—I have been too afraid of what I will find."

Godo took to kneeling again and tore the map from the floor, the paper buckling and threatening to tear down the center of Wutai. He fumbled under the flap and pulled out a package of letters and documents, scribbled over and wrinkled.

"A collection of things I saved," he sighed, holding them out as if he thought better of it. "In case I ever changed my mind."

Some had tears, had tears. Some were covered in dirt stains. Some had gone through blood…

"Take them," Godo said. "But don't come back unless you have something to tell me, and even then, only if it's good news." The same as he had said to Reeve.

If Lord Godo had so little time for putting the pieces of Yuffie Kisaragi back together, Vincent had no time for putting the pieces of Lord Godo back together. Vincent considered him with tired red eyes, watching him sag and fall to the floor once more. Something about that man—though younger—looked older. Something about that man looked like he had seen too much of life, but had no excuse to die. Something about the man looked as if he had just had to give up his only key, his only door, and that he wanted to run, to burn his own country if it would bring him back his peace.

* * *

A bushy yellow tabby cat pressed against his boot, purring. Distinct human jaw marks ringed the upper right corner of a page. Vincent had a great deal of difficulty suppressing an amused chuckle, for he could not decide precisely what could have possessed Miss Kisaragi to devour her own stunted Midgar prose.

Most of the documents, he noticed, had been written in Wutainese. For, though most of the inhabitants could speak Midgar as a result of the war, their pride confined the contents of their written work to their native language. Valentine realized that he should have considered this possibility before leaving the pagoda and contemplated strolling back up the hill to rouse Godo and drag him back to Yuffie Kisaragi's once home to serve as a personal translator.

Then he had seen the five letters, written on older paper scraps than the rest, stained by tea, spittle, dust, and what looked suspiciously like cat vomit, written in jagged shaky Midgar script by someone who did not write very often.

They were, all of them, addressed to 'V.'

'So you know how I told you about that epic story about the girl and the onion? I totally ripped it off some dead guy from Gongaga. Like for serious, I know. So weird. Why should I need to rip anything off when most of the stuff I come up with is so much awesome anyway? But it just sort of needed to be made better. By me. And it's been kind of bugging me that I lied about that, so I thought I'd…'

Unfinished.

'Yo. So I've got this plan to get rid of the tourists. I get you to stand in the center of the square and glare at them. Awesome right? So you'll do it? You will! Great. I expect you tomorrow. Wear something spooky. Oh wait. You do that anyway.'

Unsent.

'''Member that one time when you guys saved me from Don Corneo? I never really thanked you. And I won't. But I just thought I'd let you know that I don't plan on it. Didn't want there to be any confusion or anything. Especially for you because, you know, you seem confused a lot.'

Undelivered.

'I've got this ton—and I mean, like bricks ton—of letters that I've written you. And I don't finish 'em or put them in the mail. Or send them. Because I know you won't write back. You probably won't read them either, because you know, it takes a lot of time and all. But I thought you might want to know. Just in case you will send something back. Just in case you want to read them…

'…Who wouldn't, right?'

Unkempt.

'This is so stupid! Why am I writing this? Because you're like my big fat—seriously, lose some weight; it's like you'll just need a new prosthetic and a buzz cut and you'll be Barret-friggin'-Wallace—flippin' diary and I can't organize my epically deep thought processes without your ugly broody face sitting there going "Hn." And not even saying anything useful! And why? Why? Because I'm ridic. Like completely ridic. Ridic with a side of ridic on a stick. But you know what I think about you Vincent Valentine? You know what I think about you and your diary-ness? I'm going to eat your letters now. Just eat them. Like cake, only more papery and less tasteful. See. Look at that. I bit off the corner. I bet you didn't think I would; I bet you didn't think…'

Unread.

How often did they—meaning the cats that inhabited Yuffie Kisaragi's tiny shack—eat? How did they survive without her? Resourceful, like he remembered her.

Yuffie talked—and Vincent lifted another paper in Wutainese with Midgar translation: an immigration document—to old women about their daughters.

The address? Across the street. He hoped Leona Florette took visitors at high noon.

* * *

The smell of banana leaf and dried fruit wafted from the adjacent window. The gunman checked the numbers on the house, then the address, then the house again; they matched. Yuffie had even endeavored to copy the flowery script that ensconced the lacquered door frame.

The house looked just like any other house in Wutai. Thick rouge door frame with tan brown inlays. Charcoal walls. Half oval windows papered white so there was no looking in, only a bizarrely invasive sense of someone looking _out_. But something about the gilded red and the definitively earthen brown on the doors made Vincent hesitate. These were the colors she could not stand.

Vincent attempted to peer through the window, still ajar by just a crack. Having lived so long in the death-dealing profession, Vincent could smell sorrow in the food the family made after his bullet curdled the skull. The pregnant swell of bread parted in the center from over-kneading. Tears mixed with bitter-sweet liquid lemon in the funeral punch bowl so that even the children could taste it.

He heard hard steps—too heavy for a serving maid of Yuffie's—escalate behind the door, signaling Vincent to redirect his attention. When the front of the house slid open, wide but unwelcoming, Vincent could see a thick man inside.

"Yes?" Vincent at least knew that word in Wutainese. The man sounded more timid than he looked. His husky hands gripped the doorframe with a foreboding tightness that Vincent _chose_ not to interpret as threatening.

"I am looking for Ms. Leona Florette."

If he felt put-off by the unabashed use of Midgar, he did not show it. "My wife didn't say that she expected anyone."

Vincent tapped his foot.

"If you have something more to say—"

"Is she in?" Vincent sighed. He tired of the black-balled reception he received wherever he went—not that he could blame anyone, but every once in a while he wondered what it would feel like to be liked immediately.

"What's this about?"

Honesty generally worked the worst in these types of scenarios. He always used it anyway. It took too much work to come up with a convincing alternative. "I'm a care-taker of Lady Yuffie Kisaragi from the main continent. I'm here for information."

"You'll find her at the scene." A certain pleading light emanating from his big black eyes singed Vincent's tongue. "It's about three blocks north and through the woods there. On your left when you come out the other side."

* * *

The woods, Vincent decided, reminded him more of Yuffie Kisaragi than anything else in Wutai. He ceased all attempts to interpret the images in his mind in some sensible manner, and merely let them flow through him.

Fall had descended, caramelizing the edges of sage green oak leaves, leaving a sweet earthy scent to drift about the countryside. Winds carried the trickling sound of the stream. Vincent could hear the occasional finch. He could see her here: sitting on the tree branches, her feet kicking fastidiously into the breeze.

'These are the besterest trees ever, Vincent. And you know why?'

He would not answer, but she would for him.

'Because they're in _Wutai_. I thought that was pretty obvious. Do you need a map or are you happy being a directionally challenged little girl?'

But then she would realize that she could not see where she was going, that she was lost in the woods—

Through the woods and to the left.

Vincent broke into a run. When he came out the other side, before he had time to acclimate himself to his surroundings, he heard a woman scream. He followed the scream to a tiny white-papered shack. A streak of old dry death colored the front.

With a forceful shove, Vincent smashed his shoulder into the door. The roof slanted backward in a failed attempt to compensate for a split in the wall. The only room inside looked unfurnished, but the wooden floor had deep gouges. Thin grooves collected on the walls.

Vincent had only enough time to guess that the marks had been made by a metal weapon of some sort before he fired two succinct rounds from the Cerberus into the right leg of a man who, before Vincent's attack, had been pinning an unarmed middle-aged woman against the wall.

The man groaned, clutching at his wound. Irritated, Vincent kicked the man's healthy lower limb just enough to provoke a higher pitched "Ouch."

A whimper by the door barely registered. Vincent, under normal circumstances, would have told her to run, but he reasoned that she was probably Leona Florette. He still wanted to talk to her.

"Who are you?" Vincent asked the man.

"Sven, Tri," he spat.

"And you decided to attack a woman in a deserted cottage because?"

"Her family refuses to stand against the Kisaragis for the injustice."

Vincent's twitching eyebrow betrayed his confusion.

"We're worried they'll stand against us instead, and they're a small enough group that one woman would make a difference in the end."

Vincent paused. Took a moment to register the dried blood staining the white paper-like walls. Then turned back to the man huddled around his own twisted leg in the center of the room.

"So if I were a Kisaragi supporter, it would be best for me to just kill you right now?"

Swiftly, the man dove for the knife that had fallen from his hand only moments before and attempted, rather ineffectually, to leap high enough from his sitting position to drive the object into Vincent's left pectoral.

A twitch of an index finger left the suddenly violent man back on the floor, this time with a round black hole in his forehead.

Almost as quick as his Turk days.

"Oh thank you, Sir!" the woman gushed from the door. "If you hadn't passed by, I would…"

"Your daughter," Vincent began gruffly, his patience catching in all of the wrong places. "She died in this room?"

The eerie sound of silence returned for the first time since Vincent's departure from the forest. He heard it pocketing like dense cotton in the corners of the shack.

"Perhaps we should talk in the clearing outside?"

"No," Vincent answered, his eyes wandering to a blossom-shaped blood stain that spanned nearly half his height from the floor. "If you don't mind the smell, I think it would be best if we stayed."

"Alright." The woman nodded, still standing at the door, still refusing to move her eyes from the gouge in the floor. "My name is Leona Florette. From what Lady Kisaragi has told me of her friends, I am quite certain that you are Vincent Valentine."

After reading Yuffie's letters, this admission did not surprise Vincent at all. "Could you tell me," he asked, "about Yuffie's relationship with your daughter?"

"Lady Kisaragi"—Vincent tried to mitigate the intensity of his gaze, but something about her made the center of his forehead wrinkle. Her frailty? Her tired eyes? The flat nature of her voice?—"used to, at my request, convince my daughter to see the undesirability of certain suitors. Ishwara looked up to Miss Kisaragi and found her very wise."

"The day of your daughter's murder?" Vincent had to check himself. For him, that day had startlingly different significance. Vincent could see himself in this room easily. Teenagers broken at the shoulders and hip sockets. The gouges on the walls replaced by bullet holes.

But not Yuffie. Never Yuffie. Shinra SOLDIERS had always been her monsters, but her own people were different.

Vincent listened as the short Wutainese woman recounted, in detail, the conversation she had had with Yuffie Kisaragi and the foregoing details surrounding her daughter's final day. She spoke rapidly, and Vincent found himself slipping in and out of the conversation.

"Lord Godo," Vincent swallowed after she had finished. "Told me that you don't believe Yuffie was responsible for your daughter's death."

Then her head shot up. "Of course not!" Her eyes rang, her lips tightened eagerly, her crooked teeth clacked together. "I think"—and here Leona squinted—"I think she got _revenge_."

He waited for the laugh that never came, a wave of images to pool in his head.

There was only blood, only death, and only Leona Florette, eyes blazing flash balms in the cut light of the dead shack.

Revenge. Revenge on whom?

"I'll walk you home," he told Mrs. Florette. He did not feel comfortable inside the small room with her anymore.

_The epic onion story is a reference to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's onion story—which he respectively stole from an old peasant woman—in _The Brothers Karamazov_. Credit where credit is due._

**Revised.**


	8. Words

Sorry this took so long to get out. A whole week later than normal. Shame.

**Words**

A little bit like walking home after his mother's funeral. The aching notion that Yuffie had done this to herself was hauntingly familiar. But girls with 1 gil-a-pop smiles and not enough common sense do not just decide to eviscerate young men: even young men who draw red gashes down a fifteen year-old girl's arm.

The mad Yuffie? Maybe. But that left the story incomplete. If Yuffie Kisaragi did mutilate the body of Kage Sven, that presupposed the fact that she had already succumbed to madness at that point. If it was not the act itself, it was something else: something close, but not quite equal.

Wutai needed a fanning out. Vincent thought that if he could pick the city up, all of the dust would fall off and leave behind an ugly rickety shell with almost as many secrets as Lucrecia Crescent. When he walked Leona Florette home on the bare city path, he tried to avoid looking at her. He wondered when the pupils in her eyes would turn into venomous red slits and she would start lauding Kisaragi, the Great Ninja who had gotten revenge for her silly thoughtless daughter.

Vincent did not blame her for it; he just put on a recalcitrant face and kept a reasonable distance, ignoring her whenever she would attempt to reignite conversation.

When they reached Mrs. Florette's home, Vincent walked her up the steps and turned to leave as quickly as he could. But as he walked away, his foot slipping off the front stoop, he heard the groan of the paper window opening and the whisper of a man trying to get his attention without being heard.

Lucky for him, Vincent had excellent ears.

"Mr. Valentine, a word."

Slogging his legs back up the steps, feeling more tired and defeated than anything, Vincent inched toward the window, the crack only four inches tall, and lowered himself in front of it: warily, of course.

The man's dark eyes looked like caves in the dead light.

"I want to help you," he mumbled reverently around his accent like one might build around a national monument.

Vincent remembered the Wutainese documents in Yuffie's shack, but he also remembered how jarred the man's wife left him feeling. Then, of course, the fact that he whispered to Vincent through a guilty crack in the front stoop window set a few pots clanging.

"Why?"

"Because there's something Leona isn't telling me." Vincent could hear the indecision dancing along a tightrope in his voice, teetering dangerously.

After a long pause, Vincent made an uncomfortable decision. "I don't read Wutainese," he told the man reluctantly. "But I have some information on the incident that's in Wutainese. If I let you see it, though, you have to tell me what you mean by that."

Vincent heard scuffling behind the wall. The man's dark eyes blinked. "Where are you going to be later tonight?"

"Yuffie Kisaragi's old home"—and Vincent felt a bit dogged about taking someone else there, but he had no plans to strew her underwear over the floor in any case—"across the street."

"I know it," the man hissed. "Give me a few hours." The window clicked shut before Vincent could argue or ask for further specifics. Groaning, he shoved hard against the front stoop and left, returning to the shack, stewing in the silence of his own head.

-

Kibble—the result of impatience and a furtive rooting around in Yuffie's supply closet—trickled noisily into shining metal food bowls. He knew that, if her cats had survived as many years as they had without Yuffie providing sustenance, they had more than likely gone feral. A feeding hand merely served as an inconsequential boon.

He just felt bored: bored, and tired of the quiet gnawing on his skull like a voracious tape worm. He had grown too dependent on Yuffie's niggling voice to save him from the silent cycling shapes that cluttered his wearied mind, from the wordless accusations that kept him awake. This realization troubled him. Especially when he found himself reading and rereading Yuffie's letters, running over the crippled prose, trying to imagine her squeaky voice braying the content of the untidy penscrawl aloud.

If he was her diary, she was his guilty escapist hobby.

Mewling swallowed his panic, lulling him into a temporary calm. Really, he decided, he had gotten as bad as Yuffie. Only he did not actively push away his demons; he let her do it for him.

Scrapes and fumbles outside the door added to the distraction. Shaking his stillness off of him, Vincent rose slowly and went to answer the door.

When he pulled back the sliding front, he spotted Mr. Florette, vivid beside the salted night sky, his curled fist held high as if about to knock. Clearly, the early answering had caught him off guard because his face contorted into perplexity, stretching the black film of Wutainese eyes.

"My hearing," Vincent explained nonchalantly, "is particularly exceptional."

"I see," the man said, but Vincent doubted that he really did. He chewed his lower lip in silence, refusing to meet Vincent's eyes. Tired, Vincent waited for him to speak of his own accord.

"Am I allowed in?" Vincent shrugged and backed away from the door.

Mr. Florette's heavy boots rolled over the wood floor, sending Yuffie's cats skittering into tiny dark hovels. White eyes twinkled accusatorily in the dark. Vincent sighed. He sometimes forgot how much louder other people tended to be.

After a few moments of shifting, tangling thick fingers around fleshy ears, and scuffing the floor awkwardly, the man finally spoke. "I spent the three days after Ishwara's death crying in my room," he said. "But Fiona—she was just sad."

Good. Vincent wanted to send the man back out already. Yet he waited, hoping for a trinket inside of a dusty cereal box.

"I mean to say, she didn't cry," he sighed. "It was like she _knew_ it was already going to happen. Or maybe I'm just feeling inadequate because I'm supposed to be the man of the house, but I swear"—Vincent looked dubiously at him, his eyebrow raised, his lips tight—"I know it's not much, but it's what I've got."

Shaking his head, Vincent slunk over to the reading table and felt around inside of the drawers for the stack of Wuitanese documents. He pulled away more Wutainese dust—handfulls of it—and about three sheets of paper: each bearing a logo he had never seen before that morning. "Start with these," he told the man, handing the documents to him. "They look the most promising."

Clearly surprised by Vincent's lack of interrogatory measures, the big man flummoxed down into the desk chair, blinking idly.

"You aren't lying," Vincent said quietly. "That's all that matters. Read it. Tell me everything."

Cats hissed and tumbled over one another, enhancing the scent of animal that curled intimately around the furniture. This room, this part of Wutai, this part of the world lay neglected and idle, stopping where Yuffie had ceased to touch it. Vincent heard the man stuttering over words, but even he had ceased to turn, all the light flowing out of him and the dull grey pages that seemed to splinter in his thick fingers.

Vincent had stopped listening after Mr. Florette had translated the name of the establishment to which the logo belonged.

_Ridges_. The name of the mental asylum. Vincent could feel the name as hard and as real as his spine. The monsters in his head collected into one obtrusive building with off-white walls and chatter spreading like the crushing of egg shells.

He knew it, even before Mr. Florette read the last line.

"Kisaragi, Xie. Committed September 6, 1986." Mr. Florette's eyes gloss. He stares numb and brittle at the document. "Lady Kisaragi—I thought she was dead."

"Hn," Vincent merely grunted. He would have to speak with Godo again eventually, but he did not much feel like talking to him now. He had heard that Yuffie resembled her mother. He wondered if Xie Kisaragi's eyes would look as black or as hollow as Yuffie's did in his mind.

In truth, it made too much sense and too little sense. Godo. Refusing to speak of his wife, but openly offering Vincent Valentine documentation of her condition, her location, the fact that Godo Kisaragi had given up—

A cry for help. Only Vincent did not know if he was in much of a condition, the images pulling like bright red handles in his mind, to help anyone.

"What's the address?" Vincent asked, tired.

"But what does this have to do with the incident?" The man objected. His eyebrows furrowed curiously.

Vincent did not say that he did not really care about the incident in the same way that Mr. Florette did. Instead, he reminded himself that this man had had a daughter once.

"Hereditary," he said evenly. "But you're right. What else do we have in the pile?"

Crinkling and shuffling of paper made Vincent tired. His patience shriveled limply because something was telling him it was all down to the mother. Xie Kisaragi. Mad, locked away in Wutai, not dead. But no one had ever asked had they? Perhaps Yuffie had known. He wanted to read the letters again, to hold the cold words instead of the paper in his hands and _feel_ all of her secrets locked inside the box she kept closing with all of its too-shiny spoons and mirrors.

The man shook his head. "Forensics reports. You don't mind if I don't read them to you? I've already seen them." He shuddered and wrapped his arms around his waist.

Again, Vincent let his secondary thoughts tell him what to do. Shove hard at whatever troubles you until it vanishes. Hold your hands tight until they snap. You'll be waiting forever. Vincent knew, but he realized that it was not something that he could teach. "It's fine. But can I ask another favor of you?"

He nodded, his nose wrinkling into the same ridges that mottled Vincent's spine, the same ridges that housed Yuffie's mother.

"I need information, and if I can't read, I have to ask questions," Vincent began, trying not to sound too deplorably hopeless about the situation. He hesitated because he did not know this man. He did not understand anything about Wutai except for its dust and its white rose. So he plowed forward, not bothering to keep things hidden. "I need information on the Svens and the Kisaragis."

Mr. Florette scratched his chin so hard that it sounded more like a popping jaw socket then a skin rub. The cats remained silent, hidden in the dark recesses of the house: watching, always watching. "I should have expected that," he sounded sad. "What did I honestly think I was getting myself into, offering to help you? And hiding it from my wife…" He broke off suddenly when he noticed the flaccid glow of Vincent's crimson eyes.

"But I suppose you aren't so much interested in that, are you?"

"Don't get me wrong," Vincent tried his best to choose his words as considerately as possible, but it was like reaching into a bag of blue marbles looking for a red one. "I'm just very tired. I want to help someone, and I can't. I haven't been able to for months."

"I'll leave my problems at home then."

Vincent wished he could do that.

"All I know about the Kisaragis is that they rule Wutai, honest," he shrugged. "My wife knows more, but you don't seem to want to talk to her. She told me you didn't say anything the whole way home."

"How long has she been working for the Kisaragis?" Vincent wondered, first in colors, then aloud.

"Since she was a girl, I suppose," Mr. Florette said quietly, stubbing his feet at a questionable clump of cat waste under the table. "She's always worked for the ladies. She would have known about Xie I expect."

A mass of wariness pressed in furtive bullets inside of his skull, but Vincent could not properly untangle it. "Would she?"

The man nodded, his black hair fluttering around his neck. "To be honest, I don't know how they kept it under wraps so well. There was probably a reporter or two who got wind, but it wasn't even in the news, except to say she died. My wife has her obituary saved in the junk drawer. 'Lady Kisaragi, Victim of War.' Funny thing? She didn't even tell me it was a fake."

The title probably had some truth to it. Vincent recalled the brown-red blooms on the wall of the tiny Wutainese cottage and Yuffie, shaking apart against him in his lap, her eyes black walnuts, her voice crooning 'just a girl, just a girl.' "I imagine she has a plot in the cemetery."

Knuckles smoothed over the reading desk as the man nodded. "If these papers are real, it's pretty amazing."

Even Vincent could think of more appropriate words to describe the situation, but he kept them to himself.

"I suppose Lord Godo did not want the rest of the country to know that our army was led by a mad woman in the war, and if it was hereditary—no wonder. No wonder." The man took a deep breath and gave Vincent a curious glance before asking his next question. "You think she did what she did because of madness then? Kisaragi, Yuffie, I mean." The question came out like a fly with its wings removed: jerky and guilty as if he dared not speak irreverently of his princess.

"I don't even know what she did anymore." Vincent stared at the floor, covered in cat hairs and excrement, dirt, dust, and the old hopeful footprints of a little girl preparing to see the world and steal its treasures back home for her country.

Always her country. Always. But it would abandon her as it had abandoned her mother so many years ago. Vincent felt the wrongness of it the same way he had felt the cold water of Chaos crawling into his body: agony worse than the gunshot fisting through his stomach.

Vincent watched Mr. Florette try to decide whether or not Vincent had finished. After a few moments, he began stuttering awkwardly again, biting his lower lip between words. "As for the Svens—I'm inclined to agree with my wife in that I believe that Kage Sven must have started it." His wide nostrils flared and his eyes turned glassy. "They don't appreciate tourism here, and the authorities have found a few bodies lately. Nameless souls from the Midgar continent. I don't know what he would have had to do with my daughter, but—we do own a tourist shop."

This sort of useless grasping speculation, Vincent noted, nearly got him fired from the Turks on multiple occasions. Later, he had learned only to formulate theories when he had dates and numbers to back them. "Would you look into that for me?"

Mr. Florette started, disturbing the dust around his chair as he scuffled to stand. "What?"

"Would you mind looking into the Svens some more?" Vincent repeated. When the man looked into the corner, trying to catch the eye of a hiding feline, Vincent pressed on. "If you want answers, you have to find them. Don't expect me to do everything if you offer to help."

"Of course." He rubbed his thick fingers over his unassuming grey slacks nervously. "I don't know if I can face them—especially if they tried to kill my wife."

Vincent had already snatched a document bearing the _Ridges_ logo and turned toward the tiny shack door. The red cape bunched around his neck tight against impending night air. "Make a phone call then; my number's probably somewhere in Yuffie's desk if you need anything," he suggested dispassionately before he twisted his way around the doorknob and let the click of closure divide him and Florette, still standing idly in the center of a room filled with cat dung.

-

Sandalwood incense burned too low to reignite. If had ceased to smoke, it would have required replacing. Yet Godo Kisaragi touched the hissing end with water and let the butt fall, wasted, on the golden rug. He lay with his back flat, staring at the pagoda pillars arching overhead, and listening to his heart kiss his lungs. What a futile sound, he thought.

Sometimes he fancied he was waiting for an assassination attempt. After all, he had done an atrocious job of keeping the bookends of his country from shattering. Wutai spilled out like the kernels of dry rice around his fingers. Tourists owned the fragments of the throne more than he did. He always imagined himself lying exactly this way if a political murderer came: fingers splayed, grasping for nothing, his limbs cold and limp without a furnace pumping the muscle.

The last of his confidence left when the authorities had found Yuffie, her legs jutting in awkward angles, splattered red and brown with dirt mixed in blood. She had looked so much like Xie had when the forest had burnt to the ground: the yellow orange of the embers struggling in her eyes.

He had thought that maybe he had kept Xie in a box, because certainly Wutai was a box: old and full of rocks shaped like gods. She had gone stir-crazy. So he had sent Yuffie away, given her a map he knew she would lose, and a quest he knew she would adopt only until she found something that made her whoever she would want to be.

But it had not helped. Her excursion had amounted only to friendship with foreigners more spread into pieces than her. At least she had an option Xie did not. She had a life outside of politics and friends who had cured a planet. He never visited Xie, but he got monthly reports. Always the same. He had stopped reading them, burning them with his incense until the smoke had begun to cloud over his own sanity and good humor. Perhaps working out the impossible on a grand scale left Yuffie's friends more qualified to deal with incurable mental illnesses? Maybe.

But then, maybe Godo should have tried harder.

When the sliding door creaked again along the old metal track, Godo did not feel surprised. He had given Vincent Valentine the last stilt he had had left to stand on: his wife's name sprinkled like sand across three sheets of paper. He saw long bronze boots out of his peripheral vision, but he did not move to get a closer look. He laid still, his eyes on the ceiling beams.

"How do I talk to your wife, Lord Godo?" Vincent's voice had a silky touch. Godo wondered if he could crawl inside.

"The address on the documents is actually a fake. It's at the base of Da Chao, East side. The file code is 'good mourning hello.' It should get you all of the records and the visitation request form for her holding cell. She probably isn't terribly cogent anymore, so good luck. Now please go away. I won't ask again."

Godo knew that his title as 'God of the Pagoda' more than likely failed to impress Vincent Valentine. The threat tasted empty on his tongue. And Hell, maybe he wanted the tall man to stay, leaking condemnation and dribbling reproach. But Godo heard the hollow clatters of sharp metal boots echoing deliberately out the door and down the stairs until they faded into patters, then silence.

And then Godo knew; he had not tried hard enough.

-

Maybe it was something in the peanut butter. Or maybe the rice? Or maybe just maybe Yuffie could not take this house and how much it smelled like Cid-breath and cigarette smoke—which, contrary to popular opinion, Yuffie found to be quite distinct, albeit equally repulsive, scents—and all of the walls accusing her of being Yuffie—Yuffie the lazy bum stuck in a creaking shack when everyone else had grand wild adventures trying to find her sanity.

Did they stop to think for a moment that she could do just as good of a job looking for her sanity as they could? I mean, she recognized it better than anyone since she had lived with it most of her life. Well, at least she thought so. There was always the big ugly Barret-like—and really, she was too hard on Barret; Barret's a great guy—possibility that her sanity had simply never existed, but that was a defeatist take on things, and defeatist was Vincent's job.

Stupid Vincent and his not being around to handle his own crummy job.

Whatever it was, Yuffie found herself at the doorknob, pulling it like a licorice ball, and running flat on the cobble stones toward the main street of Rocket Town.

She went too slow to see Red XIII, snaking around the right side of the house to avoid detection. Nanaki growled low to activate Cid Highwind's number on his PHS, but Cid did not answer.

Cid was in the back yard, tinkering at a new model of the bright orange Tiny Bronco with his headphones on.

-

Taking down Omega, Vincent realized as he strolled through the empty halls of Ridges Asylum, had sent Chaos and all of his physical demons back to the planet. But that only left the temporary sepulcher of his metaphysical demons more vulnerable to the careful wedging of crowbars. The WRO, Shelke, business deals, and lately, Yuffie Kisaragi—the most potent force of all—had allowed him to keep them buried. He had thought them gone, settled, buried in the cold breast of Lucrecia Crescent.

But looking at Yuffie, broken and afraid of herself, had made him come to terms with his self-deception.

As a Turk, Vincent had killed a lot of people. The bullet to the Sven boy's head resembled a handshake more than a murder. The white light, the lemon, the skittering of quiet voices and guilty giggles reminded him of a path he could have taken. The hall was filled with the Turks and their victims. He watched them through a sheet of water, trapped by his own images and the silence like mufflers over his ears.

Numbers on each door he passed rang in his ears, creating a new kind of clarity. It felt like running, but at least it felt like running forward. 137. The number on the door. The nurse had granted him a skeptical look, skittering away from his eyes, but Godo had not lied to him. The pass code had worked. Kisaragi, Xie resided in room 137. They told him she rarely said anything anymore. They told him none of her words made sense.

But Vincent did not deal in words. He ignored the warnings.

131, 133, 135 on the left…

The black letters jutted from the door. White wrapped around it, draining the colors away from him. This was not purgatory, of that he could be certain. His clawed hand wrapped around the handle—

"Stop." The threadbare voice squeaked through the door crack.

Vincent paused.

"What is today?"

"Thursday," he said quietly.

"Oh alright," the voice continued. "I suppose you can come in then."

Opening the door felt like glass jammed in his eyes. Light too bright hummed in the corner, turning everything white and yellow. His eyes adjusted to the brightness after a few moments. Vincent found himself standing in the center a square ten foot by ten foot room with only white walls and a fragile steel-framed bed.

His nostrils picked up the scent of celery and green apple soap. His eyes beheld a middle-aged woman with ink black hair and pale skin that glowed under the fierce white light. The right leg dangled, kicking off the edge of the bowed bed. The left leg tucked snugly under the knee of the other. The emaciated back buckled over a narrow waist. Vincent saw black eyes, empty and wide.

But the face was too narrow. The nose too wide. Her lips, though thin and crooked, fit properly on her face.

To Vincent, Yuffie Kisaragi looked nothing at all like her mother.

"I told them I'm not eating today," she insisted. "So if that's why you're here—"

"It isn't," Vincent said cautiously, still shocked by how very little she reminded him of Yuffie. Her voice sounded disdainful and grated over the low notes.

"In that case, sit down." She motioned behind him, but Vincent saw no chair, and she did not smile.

"On the floor?"

"No! What kind of a hostess do you think I am?" She blinked rapidly, arching a thin left eyebrow. "The red chair, mind. The last visitor had an accident in the green; it's liable to still be a little messy. Besides, you'll match in the red. Such _lovely_ eyes."

Vincent remained standing, but she did not seem to notice. Her eyes fixated on his face. She ran a thin index finger over her lower lip absently. "You look familiar," she murmured. "You wouldn't happen to be one of Mizugo's boys would you?"

Swallowing, Vincent shook his head.

"A pity," she grumbled. "The Mizugos are such good friends of the Kisaragi clan. I thought, perhaps, I could meet my fiancé. I haven't, and I'm supposed to marry him tomorrow."

"You don't remember Lord Godo?" Vincent asked her, feeling his throat tighten.

"Why would I?" She laughed caustically; the sound tickled his ears. "I've never met him. But I suppose I will tomorrow. There's no point in me meeting him _now_. I'll just find him ugly and botch the whole thing. He has such a wide face I hear. They say men with wide faces father bad sons."

"You don't have a son," Vincent sighed. "You have a daughter."

She laughed again, and Vincent understood what bothered him about it. Her laugh came out too controlled: like she meant to sound that way, the breath hissing in and out through her teeth. "You're a very strange man," she said as her eyes narrowed. "But I have no daughter, and I _will_ have a son."

Vincent stared at Xie Kisaragi. He felt suddenly very lost, trapped in the hollow olive black eyes. What had he expected, he wondered? For some reason, he had thought he could get answers, but all he saw when he looked at her was another woman, another life, another Turk perhaps.

But he could not find Yuffie in her anywhere. And even if he could, what good would that have done? She smiled at him, her eyelashes batting like cracked searching fingernails. He saw nothing in her: only a message-less bottle, locked in time.

He turned to walk away. "I'm sorry Lady," he said wearily. "It would seem that I have the wrong woman."

"Oh don't go!" He heard the wheezing voice. "Don't go! It gets lonely waiting for tomorrow. I want something pretty to look at, and Leona has taken down all of my paintings! She's such a spiteful girl, Leona."

Quickly, his neck snapped back around, his feet following, and Vincent's eyes flared along with his ears. "Leona Florette?"

But the woman suddenly looked morose. She clutched at her waist and stared despondently at the green-striped mattress. He felt the blood in his chest thicken, clogging the ventricles in his lungs.

"Lady"—he stumbled a few feet toward the bed and rested his right hand over her curled left knee—"could you tell me about your paintings?"

"They were pictures of the forest," she whispered quietly.

Vincent recalled the new springy group of trees around the pagoda before the crest of Da Chao. He remembered that they had not been there before this year…

"She took down the paintings?" Vincent asked.

"Yes—after. After." The graying tips of her black hair seemed to wilt.

"After _what_?" He pressed.

Xie snaked her eyes around behind his head to where a thin rectangle of darkness slunk through. "I have such a pretty little girl Godo," she told him. "Isn't she pretty?"

"Yuffie?"

"Yes, Yuffie." She smiled weakly, raising a heavy head. Black bangs fell from her face and he could see salt dripping from her eyes. "Don't you remember your daughter's name? She's very pretty. Thank you for her."

When Xie lifted small wrinkled hands to his temples, Vincent felt a cool calm wash over him. The light vanished a moment, and he saw clearly.

Flowers sprinkled like diamonds in the red Sun. A little girl about five years old wore a small yellow sundress with tall scraggly bonsai trees stretching into a crown above her: too big for her head. He watched her climbing, climbing the roots and the trunk until she reached the top branch. She laughed a very familiar tinkling laugh as she pulled off twigs, clutching them in her fists.

But then the twigs splintered in her hands, fading like smoke. The tree vanished and the girl was falling, falling until she stood on a dark grey ground. Soot everywhere. No trees. The small knees buckled, and the little girl was on all four limbs. She screamed and begged for the forest to return.

Only the wind blew by, parting too-short black bangs, carrying away the water of her eyes. The forest did not listen.

And the girl? Her face? Too wide. Her eyes? Grey but full of silk and storm. Her lips? Tiny like a button that did not long.

And her limbs? Spider legs.

But Vincent had never seen anything more beautiful than Yuffie Kisaragi, five years old and crying.

Xie's hands left his temples and she smiled serenely once the image cleared. "I burnt it to the ground you know. That's why she took the pictures down. Godo told me, 'Leona loves you; she just wants to help.' But I knew. I knew."

Dazed, Vincent gripped Xie's other knee with his claw and used it to stand. "What did you know?" he asked her quietly.

Frail hands darted around his shoulders. She stood suddenly, her face pressed to his left ear. The laugh of her voice tickled uncomfortably, and he wished that she would not stand so close. "She thinks Yuffie's crazy too."

Then Xie unclenched her fingers, slumping down his front until she sat at his feet. He looked down to see her cross-legged, and staring up at his face. She gave him a smile he felt sure could have made him his chest catch. The white of the light made her look like a ghost as she faded back, less real and more like the Xie he had seen when he first walked in the room.

"You're so handsome," she said breathlessly. Her voice reminded him of cherry pits. "Are you sure I don't know any of your relations. Perhaps your mother?"

Hissing alerted Vincent that his PHS was vibrating in his pocket. Vincent ignored the imploring dark eyes and answered, recognizing the loud breathing on the other end of the phone.

"Vincent," Mr. Florette's voice chafed. "I found something on Kage Sven. He was an assassin. I had to do some digging around, but I found out"—and here Mr. Florette's voice sounded like magma inching along the hard inside of a volcano—"he was on a job."

When Vincent looked at Xie Kisaragi again, he saw a little girl wearing red inside of a green room with bare walls. He heard the surreptitious pattering of feet on the floor and the whisper of two older feminine voices. Clicks whirred in his head until Xie's words and the images she had given him were scuttling along the walls, clipping at him like bright red lobsters. "I'll meet you at your house in an hour or so," he told Mr. Florette.

"I don't think that's such a good idea—"

Vincent pressed the end button on his PHS.

His eyes were still on Xie, sitting patiently, her hands wheedling in her lap now. Her facial expression had not changed. Still innocent, still hopeful.

"My mother killed herself when I was very young," Vincent said quietly.

She only blinked, appearing to him as if she had heard him, but could not properly understand. He decided he could sympathize and turned to leave—to run as far away from Xie Kisaragi and her deceptively gorgeous images before he locked himself inside of them.

But, just as he left the room, his claw still clutching the doorknob, Xie Kisaragi spoke her last words to him.

"She sounds like a good mother," Xie whispered. "She saved you. Otherwise, you would be her; children always become their mothers."

The dark of the hall hid the horror in his eyes.


	9. Actions Do Not Speak Louder Than

_Thanks to anonymous reviewer, 'thegreathippothief' for the review, and even the concrit! I'm glad that the writing gets clearer as you go along; it means I have improved._

**Actions Do Not Speak Louder Than**

Cool blue, Tifa Lockhart felt, accents a bar better than any other color. Something about the lighting made alcohol spills look like quiet lagoons rather than messes. It lulled her into complacence despite the roar of drinking songs; she barely noticed the soft vibration of her PHS in her back pocket.

"Tifa here," she groaned because she noticed a man wiggling a lofty eyebrow at her chest.

"It's Reeve," the voice breathed. "Think you can get over to Rocket Town? I can't reach Cloud. Try to bring him."

Tifa, who had not had a sudden mad urge to visit Cid Highwind for some time now—or ever—hummed with exhaustion. "If you haven't noticed, Reeve, I'm a bit busy."

The WRO commissioner could not have _not_ heard the drunken cadence in her bar.

"It's about Yuffie," Reeve sighed. "She's killed someone."

"Yuffie's killed people Reeve," Tifa grunted. She rolled her eyes before she realized Reeve could not actually see her—unless, as she sometimes suspected, he planted surveillance bugs to keep an eye on her.

"Not like this," Reeve said sadly. He sounded like wilting strawberries. "Yuffie hasn't been well lately Tifa. Vincent's been handling it, but I don't think we should keep quiet anymore. She needs help."

The glass in her hand slid a little, but Tifa had enough presence of mind to catch it before it shattered on the tile floor. "What kind of help Reeve?" She did not mean for her voice to sound so severe, but she kept thinking 'Why has no one told me? Do they honestly think that an emotionally inept Vincent Valentine can offer better advice than I can? What? Why? Why? Why?' to the tune of One-Eyed Sally—the unfortunate song that graced here ears, rimmed with the slovenly sounds of beer-guzzling.

"Yuffie, I think, is mentally sick," Reeve choked on something. It took Tifa a few seconds to realize that he had choked on the same block of ice she felt creeping up her throat. "She killed a man she hospitalized earlier Tifa. And she hasn't come back mentally. She's still somewhere else. I can't see her eyes. I had a psychiatric friend come down to assess her condition, and he doesn't sound optimistic about in-house care…"

He trailed off. Tifa did not think it appropriate to tell him that she had not understood anything he had said. She just felt a scratching in her head like a fat animal trying to burrow through her skull.

"I'll call Barret too," she snapped back into the eager, emotionally strong mold she wore like a second skin. "Don't do anything until we get there."

She hung up the PHS. Her dry breath faded into the blue of the bar.

-

His PHS had started ringing as soon as he left the signal-less wasteland of _Ridges_. The bold white lettering of caller ID blipped "Reeve" every time. He tried to keep the smoldering that roared betrayal to a minimum; it was not the most pressing concern at the moment. Red XIII had called Reeve, yes. But Reeve had called him.

Something had happened.

Vincent felt another ankle-snapping kinship with Lord Godo. He did not want bad news: not yet anyway. Valentine still had a solution to find, and for Holy's sake, he would: even if he had to blow torch the dust off of Wutai to find it.

Smashing his PHS into his thigh pocket, Vincent strode toward Florette's house. Each step felt like spinning over pebbles. Each laborious motion sounded like a death knell. He still had not quite decided whether he would shoot someone today, but his gun felt cool and welcoming in his hand, and his trigger finger was slap-happy.

Vincent slipped up the polished stairs. Mr. Florette was waiting for him with fingers knotted into exes at his waist. His black eyes were drained of anything alive. "I don't know why you wanted to meet here, but don't tell my wife about my involvement," he whispered.

"Did your source say who hired your daughter's 'boyfriend'?" Vincent liked getting to the point.

"No." The man's forehead scrunched uncomfortably. "But I have my—"

"Was the source reliable?" Vincent pressed, flicking his gaze to the sliding door nonchalantly.

"Very," the man nodded.

"That's all I need to know," Vincent sighed. He took a quick step toward the door and gripped the rim with his bronze claw, wrenching it against its protesting floor rung. The man's gasp came out like the dying of a loud dishwasher behind him.

"That was locked!" he protested as if that should have, somehow, bothered Vincent.

The gunman ignored him, slithering in through the front door and making an effort, for the first time he could remember, to be loud.

"Mrs. Florette," he called. "May I have some more of your time?"

The sound of punctured gurgles drifted down zig-zagging steps. The interior was rather modest: brown, wooden, dotted with red. An austere sofa hugged the wall in front of the white paper window. Very little existed to buffer the noise of interrupted slumber and a woman who did not like the sound of metal boots in her house.

Funny how Vincent had no consideration for her likes and dislikes at the moment.

"Go away" came the brittle cracked voice, black and liquid like the eyes he remembered in the safe house.

"Mrs. Florette," Vincent growled. He could feel the hollow husks that his demons once occupied shuddering in his head. "I met Xie Kisaragi today."

Cryptic conversation was something Vincent was not used to. But the subtle hint stagnated in the air, pulling hairs and turning mattresses into shrapnel. Words had their own kind of power.

Shuffling occurred on the upper floor. Thunks and scrapes trickled to the rim of the stair case. Sheets of red lace slid lazily down the steps before Leona Florette did. Vincent shuddered. Wearing red was too obvious, but the orange forest fire in her pupils gave her away.

"She's pretty dreadful, isn't she?" Leona Florette grumbled, sliding like silk down the stairs.

Vincent said nothing, waiting for her to say something else, but she was going to make this more difficult for him than it needed to be.

Kernels of glass scattered in his head as he tried to keep them jarred. He tried to translate them, but grunts skidded to the tip of his tongue instead. He held them back and swallowed. Tried again.

"I have this suspicion that I don't like," he told her. "I want you to tell me what you know."

The wrinkles around her eyes deepened as she drew her pupils together. "It sounds to me like you just don't understand."  
A pang that felt crushingly familiar tightened his throat. He rarely understood.

"Did you hate Xie Kisaragi enough to give up your daughter?"

"I didn't hate Xie Kisaragi." Mrs. Florette shook her head. "I hated her madness."

Vincent felt his index finger twitch before he realized that that was not an answer.

"Tell me about the fire," he commanded as soberly as he could.

"The Lady had to do some horrid things in the war," Xie said sadly. "Killing Shinra soldiers far from home, taking children captive. She was a general, and she couldn't take it. She burned the forest down around the Pagoda. And then she descended into madness. We tried to keep the portraits of the forest from her, but it only worked for so long. We had to commit her before her daughter would be old enough to remember, before the people got suspicious."

"But that wasn't enough," Vincent said flatly, watching the cold flicker in Leona's eyes.

"Madness was in the blood," Mrs. Florette nodded. "And it showed. Yuffie came back laughing after the Meteor episode, but I saw it in her eyes like I always saw it in Lady Xie's. Wutai could not afford to have another Mad Lady. She refused to marry. If a war came, we would have no one to fall back on. And worse yet, if she did marry, the madness would keep popping up. She had to be tested."

This was the most muddled, drawn out confession Vincent had ever heard. His heart purred in his forehead. He saw Xie Kisaragi burning down the forest, Leona Florette whispering horrors into a young Yuffie's ears. He saw her throw her own daughter, bloody and broken at the feet of a man who looked disturbingly like himself.

His fingers itched. Justifying herself made it harder on her. Some things he could not forgive. Some things he did not want to understand.

"You used your daughter to test her."

"She was nearing the breaking point," Leona said, looking only slightly remorseful. "I told him to set release birds around the site so that he would know when she walked by on the way to visit her father, and to make it brutal because I knew if it didn't get her, nothing would, and Wutai would be safe. I would have done the duty I swore to the throne. And now she can never have it. Her line is dead. Wutai is still safe."

"You aren't answering my question," Vincent snarled.

She shook her head sadly, her hand resting on the arm of the stairs. "You don't understand, do you?"

"Did you have Kage Sven murder Ishwara Florette?" Vincent ignored the question. He just wanted one word.

"Yes," she said sagely.

Her eyes turned puerile grey when he raised his gun. Her lips curled into a panic.

For a moment Vincent thought sensibly. He could have her jailed for ordering the assassination. He could do a lot of things. But he thought of Yuffie Kisaragi, caged—like Xie—in _Ridges_, her eyes black and her fingers like claws in his back, screaming about the red dripping, bleeding from the white of the walls. She would never get better.

Vincent pulled the trigger.

Now Leona Florette would not either.

With a flourish of a red cape, Vincent turned and saw the empty caves of Mr. Florette's eyes. He sobbed like a murdered man and kneeled beside his bleeding wife, her face twisted forever into cruel shock.

Vincent Valentine did not have enough pity or words left for him.

When he walked, heavier and lighter, from the front stoop of the Florette's, Vincent's PHS buzzed in his thigh pocket. He flipped open the phone, not bothering to check the Caller ID, assuming he would hear Reeve.

"Vincent?" It was Cloud's voice. But Vincent did not have much shock left either.

"Hn."

"We've made a decision," he said quietly. "We want you to know that we're taking Yuffie to Edge."

His forehead buckled together. Vincent tried to find the cool night of Wutai, but it was hidden, like everything else, under the thick brown of the dust.

"No," he said one more desperate time.

"Vincent," Cloud sighed. "I know you might think—"

"Actually Cloud," Vincent sighed, remembering the flickering of white trees in Forgotten City, the way he had given the blond advice. He imagined that Cloud tried to gather as much stability as he could to return the favor, but Vincent did not need it just then. "You don't. But I appreciate the gesture. What I meant was, 'no,' you aren't taking her to Edge. I am. Wait for me. I'll be there in a couple days."

"Alright," Cloud sighed. Vincent felt a bitter hollow sort of satisfaction when he realized he had finally said something right. Even if he did not mean it. Not really.

The gunman knew he still had a long painful conversation that he had to have with Godo, even if he had to kick the once-snarking ruler of Wutai from the stagnant pagoda floor. But after that, he would leave the dust, the secrets, and the new forests of Wutai. This tragedy, he knew, was one thing he could not blame himself for.

-

The decision had been a difficult one. Tifa and Cid had fought it until they heard the brittle hissing sirens of the Rocket Town authorities. They had fought it until Reeve breathed power and glossed over the confrontation with the promise that "It will be taken care of." They had fought it until they had seen the look in Yuffie's eyes and understood what Reeve had meant about her "not coming back."

But Tifa had still been a little hopeful, just a little, that Vincent would object over the phone.

She tried not to show her irrational disappointment externally.

Now all that was left was the waiting, waiting, waiting.

Reeve was inside alone. He had told her that she could not come in and stay with Yuffie. She could not hug Yuffie to her bosom and plead for it to all be over. She could not wish to wake up in the cold blue of the bar and call Kisaragi tomorrow to hear "Tifa, haven't you moved out yet? You could totally come to Wutai and I could hook you up with a high-class guy instead of that mope-ster with Kalm Fries on his head."

Despite their shared gender, Tifa and Yuffie had not really ever gotten close. But Tifa still felt her breaking like she would feel the breaking of any member of AVALANCHE. Saving the world together turned "close" into a purely relative term.

She would lie to herself if she thought that the decision had been easy for any of their friends. Barret had choked awkwardly and turned away, but Tifa saw the wetness creased around his dark skin; he could not hide it from her. Cloud had cleared his throat awkwardly and volunteered to call Vincent one last time after Reeve had wandered, dejected, into the Highwind home. When Red XIII voted, he had buried his muzzle beneath his paws and shut his dark brown eye hard against Tifa's admonishing glare. Cid looked like he had swallowed his cigarette, more than likely blaming himself for not keeping an eye on Yuffie.

But with Yuffie, there was no keeping an eye out. She would sneak through the center of Gaia by liquidating. Or so she said.

Tifa told herself that this was the best decision. But why could she not remove the bleeding sensation in her mind that accused her of giving up before she even started?

A gnarled ear slinked up and Red XIII shook his head. "Vincent's coming."

In five minutes, Tifa could see the huddled black shadow slinking up the lawn. He had discarded his red cape so she had difficulty distinguishing him from the brown of the Rocket Town buildings. When he got even closer, she could see black sunglasses covering his eyes. He walked like judgment; she felt a chill run down her spine.

Red XIII lifted himself from the warm summer ground and ambled over to Vincent. He shook out his fur and flicked back his ears. Tifa thought perhaps he was trying to put on a more amiable face. "What did you find in Wutai?" Red XIII asked.

"Nothing," Vincent grunted, "that would change your mind." Something about his voice sounded stronger than Tifa remembered it: surer, aware that sometimes things had to be said. Talking, she thought, did not seem so much like swallowing pineapple to him anymore.

"She's inside with Reeve." Red XIII bristled at the hostility Vincent exhibited, but he lowered his hackles after only a few moments. Tifa did not particularly pick up on any defiance, just bitterness, which she could not, in good conscience, blame him for. "He'll probably want to start going soon…"

"I'm talking to her first," Vincent interjected, and then added, "alone."

Perhaps, after all, Vincent did have some defiance in him.

"Vincent…" Red XIII started to object.

"Just let me by Nanaki." Vincent sounded impatient, and Tifa felt her curiosity stretching along his trajectory path past the docks and off toward Wutai. What had he seen?

She did not get a chance to ask. With some reserve, Red XIII and the rest of AVALANCHE stumbled to the side. They watched Vincent walk, exhausted, to the entrance of Cid Highwind's home without a word.

Tifa could feel the curiosity rough and palpable following his tired gait. All eyes stared at the turning doorknob as the heavy wood slid shut behind him.

_So this chapter was short, and I wanted it to feel rushed because I didn't want it to come off climaxy, and I wanted to convey how very tired and uncaring for these things Vincent is. I suppose I could have gone another way about it, but I'm not sure. Let me know what you guys think?_

_Also, it's short because I want the next chapter to start a certain way. And that concludes my longest and most indulgent author's note of the fic. Thanks for your patience._


	10. Cyclamen

_Big thanks again to thegreathippothief for the review. I am pleased to have inspired such an interesting analogy._

**Cyclamen**

The town air smelled so fresh that Yuffie almost forgot that it was air and not some super delicious lemon popsicle covered in blueberries and chocolate and all of the good things she remembered from when she was living the life of a rich girl. Not that, you know, she missed it or anything. Because Yuffie Kisaragi did not miss. If she did, she would totally rectify the situation, like three months, seven days, two-point-five hours ago _so_ _there_.

She just had to find the hospital and ignore the grating sandy feeling under her shoes that she had grown unused to. For a moment, she wished for rain season because she liked the mud squelching between her toes and it would go _just right_ with the sweet wet smell of fresh air. The lane made her feel small, so she took longer strides just to mess with it.

Stupid lane.

Kisaragi rushed passed each sign barely registering the colors or the words. Every once in a while, she felt a stuffy creeping sensation in the recess of her skull and had to look at the bright yellow Sun. It always twinkled back at her reassuring, as if to say "I got your back Yuffie-licious."

She would nod and wave thanks before she kept going. Had to acknowledge the fans and all that.

Glazing over the boring boring buildings, Yuffie almost missed the square door that led to the hospital in Rocket Town. With amazing reflexes born of natural talent and unmatched dedication, Yuffie skid to a halt and slunk through the door on a back swing from the forward door push.

And this time, she had no reason not to restrain the victory dance.

The nurse stared at her stupidly but she ignored him. He just did not know sex incarnate when he saw it.

Having defeated the door, she blustered merrily forward before she remembered that she had no clear idea where to find the man to whom she wanted to apologize. He was, she assumed, in a room. With a back brace of some kind. But what were front desks for?

After a brief tryst—okay, so it wasn't a tryst, but that receptionist was totally into Yuffie; she just didn't know it—with the front desk clerk, Yuffie came away with scraps from a hole punch in her hair and the room number 307B on her palm.

Up the elevator and three doors down the left most hallway, Yuffie collided with the door in question. Taking a deep breath and double-triple checking that the crazy was nowhere to be found, Yuffie turned the doorknob and snuck—well, she stumbled about around the corner—through the self-made crack.

Yuffie looked around and noticed that there was a man laying on a green-sheeted bed with beedy black eyes and a body cast from the waist down. The creases around his eyes were curled out. He appeared to be from Wutai.

Which made it worse because his princess had knocked a bookshelf on his back. She winced.

The man's hands fisted the sheets. It looked to Yuffie like he tried to scurry back away from her, but the cast did not want to cooperate.

"I came to apologize for freaking out," she said rubbing her fingers behind her neck. She wasn't very good at this. "It was sort of uncalled for."

He just kept looking at her, pulling his hands onto his lap so that he could better hold them up if she would lunge at him.

Yuffie felt a little peeved. She had just apologized after all. What gave him the right to blow her off? Weren't people supposed to, you know, _accept_ apologies? "Hey Mister—"

But when she took a foot-long step forward, he flinched. His tight eyes fluttered in his face.

With a heavy sigh, Yuffie flopped down on the white tile floor and glared at the iron bed leg. The air relaxed a little. She did not need to look up to know that he had released his shoulders enough to peer down at her.

Not that she could blame him. She was pretty magnetic where the eyes were concerned. Still, she felt something like scissors against thin tinsel in the small of her back, and her agitation would not let up no matter how hard she focused on making it disappear.

The bedded man must have taken her moment of dejection as a sign of weakness—which was dumb of course; Yuffie never showed weakness—because he whistled softly and started to speak.

"It's alright Lady Kisaragi," he mumbled grudgingly. "I—no harm done."

Yuffie twisted into herself. Her head dropped between her long legs to the floor. She felt it cool and thrumming against her forehead until she had to squeeze her eyes as tight to hold back the water.

Just for a moment. She released the tension in her back and raised herself steadily up again. She asked him, "You ever been crazy?"

And he said "Not that I know of Lady."

To which she replied "I didn't know for a really long time."

Yuffie could not see him on the bed, but she could hear him fidgeting with the sheets in an effort to quell his discomfort. It wasn't every day that a man tried to scrape the heir to the throne of his country and would-be murderer off the floor while maintaining the relatively safe, yet unyielding vantage point of a hospital bed.

Oh. And the part about being stuck in the body cast had to put a damper on things too.

She would give him points for that, but Yuffie was not in a point-giving mood. She doubted that the dingy smell of rotting carrots stuffed under the mattress helped.

"How did you find out then?" He utterly failed to hide the lack of curiosity in his voice.

She gave it to him. She was generous like that in her state of uncharacteristic dejection. "Vincent told me the day after—you know—yeah that." She felt her struggling smile wilt again.

"Oh. He's helped you a lot then?"

"Yeah," she grumbled, raising her face just enough to see his arm dangling over the side of the bed. "Except that the stupid jerk face picked up and left a week ago."

"I'm—I'm sorry to hear that." And he totally wasn't. Sometimes, being royalty sucked. Sometimes, your subjects had to dust off your rump when you were down. She had mixed feelings on the matter.

"Mmf," she grunted, not willing to call him out and shatter the fake feeling of forgiveness. Everything felt so fluffy and plastic mattress cozy because of it. "He's an idiot anyway. Can't figure out why I even like him."

"Is he a prospective suitor, Lady?" asked the bed-ridden man, feigning interest in politics.

"No," she snorted, pulling her hair back with a sticky left hand. "I like him too much."

"Oh, I see," the man said unhelpfully.

"You don't actually." She laughed. "But that's okay. Not everyone's as brilliant as I am, so don't be too hard on yourself."

Except that her voice sounded less vibrant than it usually did. He tactfully ignored it.

"I suppose not," he admitted.

Yuffie Kisaragi stared thoughtfully at her toes bunched against the flat of her sandals. "Do you think mad girls can fall in love?" she asked him, trying to mask how much the question meant to her.

"I don't know, Lady Kisaragi," the man said tiredly. "As I've already claimed, I don't know what it feels like to be mad, and I've certainly never been a girl. I can't answer that question for you."

The way he said it—like condemnation decorated with disgust—sent Yuffie bolting to stand. She fisted her sides and shot black darts at the man's now-relaxed body on the bed.

"Well you've got an imagination haven't you?" she glowered. "Use it then! Just because I dropped a book case on you—you have no right to ignore your duties to your country! If your Lady asks you a damn question, she expects the best answer you can give her."

"You know," and he crossed his arms over his chest. "I don't much care about the bookcase as my cousin—the one you tried to strangle—anyway. But you're right; you're still my Lady. I think you can fall in love all you want, but I also think it would be irresponsible in your condition. I think you should get help from a doctor. I think a lot of things, but I don't say them because you're the Lady, and you're supposed to know these things."

"But I don't," she snapped. "Is that such a crime?"

"Yes," the man rolled his eyes, "yes it is."

With a gust that truly _reeked_ of awesome, Yuffie twirled on one foot for her dramatic exit toward the door. What did he know anyway? He was stuck in a room with his feet tied up. Responsibility is a big talk when he doesn't have any.

"Lady Kisaragi," he started when her hand was on the door. "I'd like to help you."

"I _got_ help, thanks," she snarled. Yet she could not ignore the tiny voice in her head that cackled at her and told her she was delusional. She was on her own and stuffing the last ounce of help offered to her under the sallow green sheets of the hospital bed just because it was not _him_ offering to help her.

Just as she had decided to turn back around and ask him how a crippled man in a hospital bed could possibly help _her_—beg if she had to, not like anyone was looking or anything—the knob turned under her fingers.

The door opened toward her. She had to skitter back a bit, but she still saw the face.

Tiny black eyes, flat slanted nose, a lip that curved in an awkward waving line.

That face, covered in the same shock, dripping with tomato seeds. Only they weren't tomato seeds. It was the red on her hands. The red on the door. The red on the walls, her legs, her body on the opposite side of the room from her legs, the toes sprinkling the ground like wet stones…

So uncertain. So afraid. All four of them.

-

Moments later, when Yuffie Kisaragi had left the hospital room, the man in the cast sat huddled on the bed, and felt utterly helpless. The body of his cousin, Jito Sven, slumped against the wall, leaving red streaks after it.

The man on the bed remembered disowning the family with his cousin Jito because they hated the violence, and he hated his cousin Kage Sven.

But the violence had followed them, and Kage Sven's brother—whose face looked so like his younger sibling's—lay dripping on white tile floor around steel bed legs.

When, the man wondered, was the last time he lived in the normal? And why—_why_—had he lied when he had claimed that he did not understand what it meant to feel mad?

-

The door of Cid Highwind's front door opened for Vincent as if it were welcoming a lost child. The familiar creak of the wood floor made him forget Wutai, made him forget Xie Kisaragi, made him forget Leona Florette, because just then he was in Rocket Town, and just then he wanted very badly to see Yuffie Kisaragi.

Yet when he rounded the corner he found Reeve Tuetsi sitting alone at Shera's floor table, staring at the cup of coffee cradled in his hands.

"Reeve—"

Vincent's stern interruption caused Reeve to jerk his hands and toss the contents of his coffee mug onto his previously immaculate blue suit. "Damnit Vincent," Reeve hissed as if pained, though Vincent doubted the coffee had been hot, "ever considered walking a little louder for the lowly less-enhanced?"

Tuetsi fiddled with a ratty stained kerchief and refused to look up.

Only Vincent did not have the patience to skirt the issue today. "Reeve, what is everyone doing here?"

"It seems that Yuffie had an accident after you left." The commissioner grimaced one last time at his soiled suit before raising his eyes. "She left the house and went to the hospital. Cid found her on the street after—covered in someone else's blood."

Vincent heard the steady condemnation drifting on Reeve's voice like beads of oil. He thought little of it. The red sheets wafting through his mind had a much more palpable effect.

"His name was Jitto Sven, apparently: the man she tried to strangle before in the bookstore."

Vincent nodded dumbly. Of all the little stupid details, the name he had not wanted to know raked his ear drums with arsenic. His vision grew a little fuzzy, and he started to hate himself again before he remembered Leona Florette standing in front of a jagged staircase in Wutai. She looked regal, and she refused to say sorry.

Not that he would have listened. He did not even accept his own apologies.

Colors in his head would not shift aside to reveal Jitto Sven's face. He did not remember because the man's face had been unremarkable and he had not wanted to remember it at the time; he remembered Yuffie's instead.

"I have to talk to Yuffie," Vincent insisted.

Reeve drew circles in the coffee spill on the table with an empty hand. "You aren't going to get much out of her, Vincent."

The nurse at _Ridges_ had told him the same thing about Yuffie's mother.

"What do you mean by that Tuetsi?"

"I mean that she's still the way Cid found her—a week ago. She eats. She sleeps. But she doesn't seem to get where she is. She recognizes people, but Hell if that means anything. She walks around in a daze, and she's—she's pretty jumpy. Her demeanor switches in seconds. Worse than before."

But the gunman could only think of a long white hallway with the number 137 jutting from the front of a casual side door.

He walked down another hallway—this one wasn't much of a hallway actually, and it had purples and blues swirling on the walls instead of white—with his feet shaking and his fingers bunched so tightly into his palm that he could feel the skin break under his nails.

Reeve Tuetsi of the WRO lunged for his shoulder and asked him a question, but Vincent had foolishly blocked out the words again.

To Hell with Reeve Tuetsi. He had his own questions. Vincent Valentine put his hand on the yellow doorknob and turned his wrist.

-

Mostly, the room looked exactly the way he remembered it. Walls still heaved with fickle bright paint, and the obnoxious orange chair had stood its ground through the catastrophe. Someone less observant than Vincent Valentine would not have noticed the difference immediately.

Round stones coated in blues, yellows, and purples peppered the ground, scattering when he shifted his feet. Yuffie Kisaragi sat with her knees up around he ears in the windowsill next to the bed. She stared at a sky-colored rock in her fist, completely silent.

"Yuffie."

She lifted her chin, and he saw her eyes as blank as the stones. Her mismatched mouth had peeled back to reveal a crooked grin that left his fingers twitching.

"Come to admire my awesome I see," she chided, but the voice was distant and neutral—like the voice that had first said 'Hello' in the basement of Nibleheim Mansion.

Unable to focus on anything but the grin and the distant voice, Vincent waded through the stones and bent to kneel next to the window.

"Yuffie," he repeated.

"That would be my name," she laughed. "Funny, didn't know I was quite so famous yet."

It was obvious that she did not recognize him.

Silence followed. Vincent used his right hand to cup her left kneecap. He expected some reaction—maybe a screech, maybe a pounce, arms flung wide to clasp his neck, a barrage of purple stones—but she acted as if she had not felt the pressure at all.

"Yuffie, I met your mother."

She started humming something—most likely another of her own creations—but this song sounded sad to Vincent's ears. That wasn't saying much of course. He had a feeling that any song would sound sad to him at the moment.

"She's living in a place called _Ridges_, which is—"

"What color would you like?" Yuffie asked suddenly, squashing his question.

Vincent did not ask a follow-up because he assumed that Yuffie would explain; she always did. But this time she did not. This time, it took a solid five minutes before Vincent realized that she was not going to ask. She was not going to say _anything_ if he did not first.

"Why?" He had to force the word out because it felt so _wrong_ to ask a question like that around Yuffie.

"For your materia," she grumbled exasperated. "Pick a color, and I'll give you one. Sheesh. How dense can you possibly be?" She rolled her eyes and twirled her fingers absently over the blue stone she held.

At first, Vincent thought about saying nothing. He considered picking up with his speech about her mother, but he had a feeling he could not get through to her that way. She would push off all things that tried to make sense; she would mold them into tiny round stones before she painted them neon orange and hid them behind his ears.

Instead, Vincent watched her eyes carefully, darting over the rocks, her mussed fingers cluttered with paint and tried to think hard. Because really, he could not lie to himself. At that point, he was still holding on and not letting go, and if he wanted to make it work, he had to speak her language. Luckily, he had spent years getting to know Yuffie's language, and a lifetime getting to know shapes and colors.

Steadily, Vincent lifted his gauntlet and rested it on her calloused fingers. The cuticles looked frittered away by dirt and worry. He lifted his gaze from them and rested his eyes—though she could not see them behind the veil of his sunglasses—on her face.

"Red," he told her evenly. "I want a red one."

Immediately, she slid from the windowsill and began searching through the shrunken pagoda of stones between them. When she had searched for fifteen seconds and found nothing, she began digging frantically. Her knuckles rubbed pink against the rock, and she bit her lower lip so hard that Vincent could see a black ring forming where teeth met flesh.

Eventually, her shoulders sagged, and she pulled up a yellow stone to offer to him.

Vincent remained firm. "That isn't red Yuffie."

She scowled at him, dropped the stone, and lifted the nearest purple one. When he responded similarly, her face dissolved a little. Yet she managed to maintain her quaking grin and replaced the purple rock with blue.

When he shook his head next, he had to sit still and watch the structured barrier break around her, as if the colored rocks were made of glass instead of stone.

It all unraveled. The resolve came loose in his chest and shattered like Shera's fine china on the ground in front of him.

-

Walls breathe the red mist and she can't get it out-out-out of her head. It sits and tears and snares until there's nothing left but the limbs-limbs-limbs and he is broken on the floor but she keeps tearing-tearing-tearing until he—with his beedy eyes and curled bruised lips—looks just like the girl.

In three pieces.

Her mouth, her jaw, her toes, her fingers—

More than three pieces.

So she breaks-breaks-breaks-breaks…

There is the hack and thunk like teeth in brittle white bone and the pieces are everywhere and so small that she forgets—what size, what size, what size are they supposed to be?

And it doesn't stop. It never stops. It's in her head and it won't get out because the walls are still breathing the red mist from the brown and green forest, and she just wants it all to go away.

But the screams won't come back because the girl is in so many pieces that she lost count and when did that lip turn from lush and pouty to torn and gnarled like a sawed off artichoke heart only red-red-red-red—the mist from the walls?

And it's on her shuriken like grease on propeller and why—_why—_did he have to kill her? Why did he have to kill _her_? Why did he have to kill the body on the floor the girl standing with the shuriken the mist on the walls the artichoke on the ground the pieces the toesthefloorthehairhisbloodonherstomachandoilinherhead—

And she is crying on the ground with the blood and the dirt all over her khaki shorts, and she wonders when the world got so upside down.

She looks out the window. She sees the yellow Sun turning green.

And the walls? They're _still breathing_.

-

The first thing she did was chuck the blue stone at Vincent's forehead. He failed to catch it, but she had not been sitting very far away, and so it did not hurt much. The second thing she did was throw her arms around his neck. She squeezed him hard, but he could still breathe, and so he did not notice. The third thing she did was scream and sob all down the front of his shirt. The fabric would fade, he knew, but it was an old shirt, and so he did not mind.

Vincent wrapped his right arm tight around her waist and felt her shake as the invisible fishwire that held her to him stretched and snapped. He rested his face on the top of her head and breathed in the smell of girl and chamomile shampoo. He tried not to think about letting her go again because he knew he would have to, and that was enough.

He was empty of everything but regret. Yuffie Kisaragi did not know how to regret; all she could do was push until there was nothing but stones and beads covering the red.

But he could take all of it, he realized, feeling her elbows scratch his chest. He wished she would throw more rocks. He wished she would throw more china. He wished she would hit, scratch, bite, kick him. He wished she would scream in his ears until they rang.

Maybe then he could go back to blaming himself for all of it.

Everything had been so simple when he could blame himself. If he could blame himself, he could think of separation as a form of punishment. He could muster the resolve to atone for this and leave her in the hands of Reeve's doctors.

_But he just couldn't_. Not anymore.

Wutai had not been Leona's responsibility. Yuffie was not his. He had not found anything to help Yuffie in her home city—maybe he could tell doctors where to get files on family history, but that was not of major consequence. Instead, he had found help for himself, and he wished that he had not after all.

So when she screamed and sobbed and clawed at him until she fell asleep, Vincent Valentine hoped bitterly that she would wake up for just a second and tell him it was going to be okay.

She wouldn't.

He was bad for her this way; she was bad for him. He had to let go, but it was like the end of the world for the fourth time, only worse because the bad guy was gone, and everything still crumbled.

The door creaked louder, he thought, than Yuffie's wails. He felt her grow rigid, clinging to him, before she pulled away and climbed onto her bed to stare at the ceiling.

"Vincent?" Reeve. Damn Reeve straight the Hell if he had not already.

"Hn."

If Reeve found the scene unusual, he said nothing. The Comissioner stumbled on the colored stones toward the windowsill where he stopped to loom—for once in his life—over Vincent Valentine.

"What did you find in Wutai?" he asked.

"If I haven't told Yuffie, I'm not going to tell you," he answered, agitated.

"You'll have to tell someone." Vincent told himself that the smug tone in Reeve's voice was just his imagination.

"Maybe," but this time Vincent knew he was just saying it to be contrary.

"Vincent, Yuffie has to go to Edge. Jito Sven's cousin agreed he would not press charges or reveal Yuffie's identity if _I_ promised to hospitalize her. It was very kind of him, considering."

Vincent remembered thinking that the two uninspiring men had agreed to the initial terms because of Cid's immortality in Rocket Town. In reality, they only did exactly what he was doing: protect the heir of Wutai.

He watched as Yuffie clambered from the bed onto the drifting ocean of rock. Distractedly, she started stacking the blue ones together in a pile that reminded him of dry salt.

"I know," he said as calmly as he could manage. He felt his temper flaring on the cool skin of his face, but he ignored that too.

"She'll be fine, Vincent," Reeve continued even though Vincent wished he would not, "I promise we'll never leave her alone, and I _will not stop_ getting the best doctors I can find until she's well enough to go home."

"I know," Vincent said again, trying to force a finality into his usually jejune voice.

"You'll be able to visit as much as you want; maybe you can convince Godo to—"

"_Reeve_," Vincent gasped, trying to collect the ringing empty eyes spilling like marbles in his head, "do you ever think that you talk _too much_? I _get_ it."

And he did. He watched Yuffie, or not Yuffie, as the case seemed at the moment, stacking rocks on top of each other, separating piles by colors, making smiley faces where there was nothing to smile about, and he did get it.

"Aren't they pretty?" The girl asked in a voice that sounded too distracted, too far away, drifting on the dust and the winds of Wutai.

He watched her thumb the flat of the blue stone that so mirrored her eyes, and shook his head. He remembered the girl in the empty burnt forest. She was full of sorrow then.

"No," he said. "No they aren't." Because when he saw her in Cid Highwind's guest room, she was sitting, holding her sorrow in the rocks and refusing to cry.

-

Before the morning came, fleeting images assailed Vincent. He saw himself holding a thin white hand and running somewhere no one would ever find him. He saw himself taking her to Edge and sitting in her room with her like before, only surrounded by white instead of wood. But the images wafted away like dry ice tendrils, and he could not hold them forever, lest they burn his hand.

He thought of a lot of maybes, and his mind moved fast like Yuffie's did, painting pictures, writing songs, but never telling stories—never writing endings. Eventually, he felt his hair strangling him on the floor in the living room and had to get up.

The empty room took him off guard before he remembered that Cid and Reeve had convinced everyone but himself to go home. Tifa had objected rather violently, but had finally relented under the insistence that a large group would draw attention when they transferred Yuffie.

It did not surprise him that, after only a few moments, Vincent found himself stumbling toward the guest room again. The tiny gap between the door and the wall allowed for a dingy melody to spill into the rest of the house. It sounded garbled and off-key, but Vincent expected as much.

When he approached the door, he peered inside to watch her. He had to stop and check himself because, even after everything, he still could not have predicted what he saw.

The floor was cleared of rocks, save for the back left corner where they had been stacked halfway up the wall. The bed and chair still stood in the center, but the room seemed somehow emptier and lonelier than before. Yuffie Kisaragi busied herself at the wall across from him with her back bowed and her left hand clenched around the handle of a paint can. In her right hand, she held a paint brush two fingers wide with a sprig of deep blue leaking from the tip onto the wall.

Except for that though—except for the shape she drew then—the wall was white. She had paint rolled the whole thing in the night. On the far right corner, he could see a more modest stack: an empty paint can, a roller, and a paint tray piled into a disjointed triangle.

He took a step forward. He saw what Yuffie drew in blue.

The image had the same style as the robot she had drawn on his cheek before he had started taking her into town. The lines were like broken matches, and it was only a stick figure outline, but he could still make it out.

Vincent could not restrain five more steps forward. He stopped only one step behind her and breathed in the scent of lacquer. The image appeared to be a man with two squares coming off of his back and something like a boomerang in one hand. Beside him stood a little girl up to his waist with a triangle for a dress clutching at claw-like twigs coming out of the man's other arm.

"What are you drawing?"

She did not turn around, but he could still hear the distance in her voice. "A man I know—his name is Vincent Valentine. He's kind of a mopester, and really annoying. He doesn't ever get anything right, but he's badass and awesome to talk to. Just don't tell him I said so."

Vincent felt like he had just swallowed Cloud's buster sword.

"I got the colors wrong," she rambled a little more quickly now. "He's got this sweet cape and headband, but I can't remember the right color see? Must be a pretty lame color anyway if I can't remember. I think blue's better."

He did not share his opinion on the matter. "Who's the girl?" he asked instead.

"I think it's me, but Gawd I don't know. Some girl. Annoying like."

"Hn."

"Truth is, I'm scared," she finished. "I know right? Impossible! But I've got this cold clammy nonsense going on, and I keep thinking about when I was real little and the forest burned down outside Wutai. I wanna' grow up some more, even though I think I'm big already. It just felt right to draw the little girl."

Vincent nodded and did not say anything—even though he felt like she painted his face again and not the wall, even though she could not see him nod. He had never heard her so honest about the important things before.

He stood one foot behind her and watched her draw the forest springing up around the stick figures. It looked burnt and minimalistic, and he felt so tired. He only kept himself from crying as a distraction. Otherwise, he could not have prevented himself from taking the paint brush from her fingers.

He wanted to draw himself small too.

-

Chopper blades cleaved the morning sky over Edge. The black vinyl seats made Yuffie Kisaragi stick out like a wax doll. She had been exposed to a bit of fire, but wax could melt and reform. So he told himself that and hoped he was made of wax as well.

"Hey," she said when the ground seemed to get a little closer and the buildings started to look like buildings instead of black pencils. "You look like a man who knows things. Where am I going?"

She had not actually looked at him, just the shroud of her face in the fogged window.

"A place with mirrors," he told her, inspired by the image.

"You coming with me? 'Cause if so, we definitely need to get you a set of facial expressions at the smile store."

"I'm not coming with you," he said.

"Then is that guy?" she asked, waving dismissively at Reeve who sat across from them in the cabin with crossed legs and a fake business smile.

"A little, yes," Reeve answered. "I'll be around."

"Awww," she grumbled. "You just throw me in rooms and lock the door."

Then Vincent felt a hand tighten around his wrist. He looked down and saw her hair clean and straight, her eyes fuzzy, and her lopsided grin sparkling like she had brushed her teeth too many times that morning.

"I'd much rather go with this guy," she beamed. "He doesn't say much, and he always asks the _best_ questions. Almost as good as mine. You know, if I had questions. Which I _don't_. I just know things like that."

His feet could feel the legs of the helicopter hit the concrete top of Reeve's covert hospital building. When the sound cut above his head, he looked down to see her eyes again. The irises danced behind a veil and he wanted to try, one more time, to look in the box for her. He felt like Wutai: dusty and cracked and full of so many secrets.

"I'll send you updates," Reeve said with a steady voice that sounded a touch uncertain.

Vincent nodded. "Even if they're bad ones," he said to make it very clear that he would _not_ be Godo.

Kisaragi's lips quirked up. Vincent had a sudden insane urge to try to tape her mouth to her chin so that it would not fall off before the next time he saw her. She tugged at him hard and he almost fell down the side stairs on the way out of the helicopter cab.

"You sure you don't want to visit?" Reeve asked sternly. The man folded out the hem of his suit in a vain effort to maintain order. Vincent could see tears glittering in the corners of his eyes.

"It won't help," he told Tuetsi, leaving off the "either of us."

"Maybe," the Commissioner conceded with a less than convinced growl. Reeve followed them out of the hatch.

Yuffie twisted her fingers tight in Vincent's hand. He looked around the roof top at the grey concrete and the yellow beams sticking up in the corners. He felt the air settle around his ears. It smelled nice enough outside, but everything inside pulled and ached. He ignored it.

A man in a black suit opened the arching doorway on the other side of the rooftop: one that tapered off behind into a squat rhombus. He had two other men on his arms. Though they appeared unassuming, Vincent pushed himself to check from behind his sunglasses. Neither of them looked Wutainese. Neither could possibly bear even a vague resemblance to Kage Sven.

The one on the right shuffled a nervous foot forward and came to grab Yuffie's free hand.

"Hey," she complained, sticking a leg out to kick the offender in the shin. "Keep your hands to yourself."

The man doubled over. His companions made to lunge forward and restrain her, but Reeve held up a hand. "That isn't necessary," he said. "She'll come on her own. Won't you Yuffie?"

"If my loyal fans want me." Yet when she smiled, she smiled at Vincent. "Besides, if I get bored, I'll just leave. Like a tree right?" Then she laughed, holding her free hand to her mouth. Vincent felt sure that that made the doctors uncomfortable, but he could not tell; he was looking at Yuffie.

"Okay, so that joke was bad."

Vaguely, Vincent became aware of a small fist slamming hard into the aching part of his back, but it felt like nothing compared to the warm fingers in his hand. Without Yuffie, everything would stop moving.

"But you can at least crack a smile. You know, it won't _kill_ you or anything."

"Hn."

"Come on Yuffie," Reeve said coolly. Vincent noticed him take up his commanding air, and the sick selfish part of him wanted to deck the commissioner.

"Aw jeez, keep your goatee on." She rolled her eyes at Reeve and turned back to face Vincent, still clutching at his right hand. "I bet I know what would help you smile!" she decreed with a fist pump to the air. "I'm sure it gets all dark and sad in there. No _wonder_ you don't smile."

Before Vincent could shake the numbness and understand what she meant, her prying fingers had already jolted to his face and ripped away his sunglasses.

Reeve started. The commissioner tore his hands from his pockets and darted forward. The other men on the roof, startled by Tuetsi's behavior, did the same. Feet skidded on concrete; baritone voices roared. Vincent could not make out the words—

But the uproar flittered away like an ineffectual shout. There was no need.

Yuffie Kisaragi merely stretched her smile wider than her ears and said "You have such _lovely_ red eyes Vincent. I'll miss them."

She tugged at him, and he did not pull back.

When he let go of the fingers clenched in his right hand, he knew that it _was_ the end of the world, and that part of him had died. But still, there was another part of him that was very much alive. Because of that, Vincent Valentine felt something of an ironic smile tug at his flaccid lips. Just like she said it might.

Kisaragi walked away. Her legs wobbled like thin straws as she turned. The dead swish of the chopper started up again.

The end of the world wasn't nearly as bad as he had thought it would be.

_We have an epilogue left. It will be short, so hopefully it will be out before the end of the week. Sorry this took so long. I have three versions of each of the last three scenes on my hard drive now. Heh. You'd think I could come up with something better…_

_ Also, let me know if this chapter is as overwhelmingly confusing as it might be. Gah. This story is so far beyond my skill level..._


	11. White Candle

_Thanks again to thegreathippothief_. _Never feel bad about giving me your honest opinion. I went back and tried to clear up a bit more, but I'm not so sure how much I improved it._

**White Candle**

In the end, Vincent did not open his weapon smith in Mideel; he opened it in Wutai.

Reeve, though shocked by his pronouncement, had agreed that this decision better served to carpet the globe with WRO representatives in Yuffie's temporary—he still refused to classify it otherwise—absence.

And, true to his word, Vincent did not travel to Edge to visit Yuffie at the hospital. Instead, he went to _Ridges_ to visit Xie. Every day.

137 screeched open. She no longer asked him to stop at the door. He always answered "Thursday" regardless.

The white light had stopped bothering his eyes as well. He strode easily over to the pin-striped mattress and tucked the soggy paper bag he had been carrying into her lap. She always sat the same way with one leg dangling over the edge of the bed and the other foot tucked underneath. He wondered if she moved.

After he backed into 'the red chair,' she jammed her thin fingers into the bag and pulled out handfuls of wet bow tie pasta. "You brought the good stuff again, Dear. The cooks at this establishment could learn something from you."

As usual, he did not bother to tell her that the contents had come from a blue cardboard box. He had a feeling she knew anyway.

"How's the goat?" she asked, the olives twitching in her eye sockets.

She referred to Godo. Vincent had started calling Lord Godo his pet goat after the first several visits in which she inevitably degenerated into a screaming mess of black hair. But by calling him a goat, Vincent could relay information about Xie Kisaragi's husband without debilitating her.

Sometimes she ended up addressing Vincent as Godo. He did not mind so much. He was not particularly partial to the name Vincent in any case.

"He's stopped moping for the most part." Vincent shrugged. "I've managed to get the staff to clean up his room. I have to prod him to sign papers, but at least he gets it done."

"I still say it's odd to keep a goat inside," she said breezily, shoving a kernel of pasta up her left nostril. "What does he think about it?"

"I force him out sometimes." Vincent leaned against the wall. "He puts on a brave face for the locals because I tell him he looks like a decaying corpse if he doesn't."

"Well at least he responds well to insults. It's an admirable quality for a goat to have."

Valentine slid into a cross-legged sitting position. Light caught the bronze of his boots and bolted for Xie's irises. She turned up her nose and covered her eyes, smearing pasta lint across her forehead in the process.

"Those boots of yours are ghastly, Mister Mizugo," she hissed. "Have you no common courtesy?"

"Hn."

"Don't you 'Hn' me, Sir! I thought we'd moved beyond that. Remember, each sentence requires a subject _and_ a verb. 'Hn' is neither. Try again."

Xie Kisaragi still failed to remind him of Yuffie. She liked fried eggs and blue box pasta noodles. She refused to look herself in the mirror. She had black hair and pale skin.

Vincent thought he knew both of them a lot better than that.

"I still miss her," he confessed. 'Yuffie' was another name he could not utter without consequences, but she never bothered to ask for it.

Paper crinkled. A large swallowing noise followed, but Xie did not say anything.

The difference struck him when she remained silent. She let him struggle through his words, only stopping him to comment on innocuous things like the goat in the house, or to coax him forward. She never lingered over the details, and she illustrated his words with pictures in her eyes and on the white walls to make sure the translation came through properly.

She was, as Yuffie had put it, 'his very own Vincent Valentine.'

He tried to remember when he had realized that the only people whom he could carry on a long conversation with were too mentally maladjusted to live outside of a white-walled prison. He tried to remember when he had realized that said conversations were primarily one-sided—

He tried to remember when it had stopped bothering him. Or rather, had it ever bothered him to begin with?

"Hey Godo, did you send the missive I asked you to?"

"Yes," he nodded, sighing as his clarity filtered away through the dark square between the door and the wall.

"Well?" she coaxed, upending the rest of the pasta bag into her long black hair.

Vincent heaved himself up into a standing position and crossed the space between them. "President Shinra won't be attending the wedding. He's preparing for a war." He plucked a couple sticky kernels of pasta from her hair.

"No touching the bride before the wedding!" Xie batted his heavy hand from her hair, narrowing her filmed eyes. "That's odd though. I wonder who he's planning to go to war with now."

"Gold Saucer?" Vincent offered.

"That's idiotic. Everyone loves Gold Saucer."

"You're right," Vincent apologized. "It would never happen."

"That's like saying he'd go to war with Wutai!"

"I know," Vincent nodded distantly. "It's insane. Or at least, you must have thought so at the time."

"I demand that you start making sense immediately, Boy!" Xie roared haughtily, brandishing a fistful of pasta in his face. She lowered her arms to her lap and folded her hands in her cotton gown.

"Now tell me, have you visited your mother's grave?" Her voice tightened so much that Vincent could envision tossing marbles against it and watching them ricochet back.

"No." Valentine turned to the wall on his right and tucked his hand into his cape collar for a folded piece of paper.

"And why not?" Xie's voice droned behind him. "Don't you think she misses you? It must be dark in that coffin all alone."

From experience, Vincent knew it was.

"If she thought she would miss me, she wouldn't have killed herself." He unfolded the paper with his claw and flattened the creases with his human thumb. He stared blankly at the color for several long moments, and almost did not catch the titter of Xie's response.

"Sometimes mothers don't have a choice," she said in her wilted, almost conscious voice.

Instead of responding verbally, Vincent pulled two thumb tacks from his front right pants pocket and fastened the paper to the center of the wall to the left of Xie Kisaragi. He took a step back and stared.

A cluster of stick-drawing trees in yellow, blue, and purple plastered the wall. Most of the sketches were in paint and creased both laterally and horizontally down the middle. Flecks of color glittered incongruously in the margins, and the resulting effect was as overwhelming as the walls in Highwind's guest room had been before Yuffie white-rolled them.

"Oh, they're trees!" Xie exclaimed; she had not recognized the shape before Vincent added the newest one. The newest one was certainly different: not because it was more detailed, or the shape well-defined. No, all of the drawings looked like print-roll replicas.

The newest painting, occupying the center of the wall at a four-corner annex of yellow and purple trees, was drawn entirely in green.

It took Vincent several moments, in his sudden daze, to remember that his self-prescribed lunch break would end soon.

"I—I'll see you tomorrow, Lady," he said after deciding to make for the door.

"Don't you mean next Thursday, Mizugo?"

"Of course," he said collecting himself. He bowed his head once respectfully, lowering the fold of his rumpled cape to flash a smile—though he realized that the corners of his mouth had not lifted considerably—before sliding through the dark crack and away from the light.

Though he left more unsettled than usual, Vincent remembered to inspect the images in his head when he waved goodbye to number 137. The dark lettering jutted out nosily, eager for the result of the interrogation.

"No," he told the numbers. "It won't matter to me at all if I don't see Xie tomorrow."

The numbers slipped into the door satisfied. He would be back around noon with three fried eggs.

-

He had grown to regret his decision to request construction of a new building for his weapon smith. At the time, he had wanted to shirk the plague of dust and secrets, but now the shine of glass counter made him miss the dirt. He lazily perused the garish brown and red wood beams. The luster made them look plastic: like they belonged in the theme park Wutai had become in reputation.

Coincidentally, Vincent rarely received any tourists for customers. Travelers maybe, but not tourists. The reason? Vincent did not sell shuriken or any other traditional Wutainese weaponry.

He sold handguns for the most part. .38 mm rounds glittered in a standing line in the display case under the register. Semi-automatics wreathed the room under glass panels: exemplary sell-ables.

Old Shinra-issue swords, fisherman spears, black-ball maces, brass knuckles, crystal combs, and even the occasional high-amp megaphone littered the exposed spaces in between. He kept an ample supply of pepper spray on the counter to combat the irony.

Mr. Florette, naturally, did not get the joke.

The brass bell had tinkled five hours into opening day. The burly man had bounded across the room and slugged Vincent's lower jaw with swollen knuckles. It hurt even less than Yuffie's blue stone had when it had bounced uselessly off the center of his forehead.

The intruder had then proceeded to inform Vincent that he had 'some nerve selling instruments of murder in Wutai.'

Vincent had only gazed with lidded eyes at his bronze claw tickling the counter and waited for Mr. Florette to finish his tirade. He had not expected anyone else to get it, least of all an emotionally injured man, but Vincent was done living in a box and hoping that problems would go away if he did nothing. In reality, living in a box made problems worse.

Like before, he refused to take responsibility.

When Mr. Florette had tired of waiting for an apology, he had sputtered off like a broken gasket and waddled back out the front door. It was the last condemnation Vincent ever received. It was also the last visit that had sparked any sort of emotion whatsoever.

Keeping shop had its lonely elements. Several patrons asked him for a job at one point or another, and though Vincent could afford to pay them, he always turned them down, using the excuse that he had promised the job to someone else. Which, of course he had, but that was a pithy justification, and he knew it. Truthfully, Wutai had changed him, but it had not changed him enough to rewrite his gut craving for solitude.

Except for busy weekends, shoppers came sparingly. Vincent used to think that he liked to be alone because he could not communicate. But maybe Vincent just liked to be alone.

Vincent's greediest customer, Evening, fluttered into the shop six hours after he returned from his lunch break with Lady Xie Kisaragi, reminding him to close his doors. Locks clicked around a red-handled key, and the lamplight faded.

Still thinking about the color of the tree in Xie Kisaragi's newest cell painting, Vincent's feet brushed off the stone stoop and dragged him into the forest around Godo Kisaragi's pagoda. The growth of the trees stretched taller every day. His acute eyesight allowed him to see the difference the same way it allowed him to see wrinkles cropping up on faces as they appeared. Despite these incidental changes, Vincent still recognized his favorite tree: the one with the insufferably stretching maple bow that he had the habit of picturing Yuffie perched upon.

With his head resting against it, he stretched down to sit at the roots. His limbs felt as hollow and aching as snapped lumber. Wind passed through his hair, and he heard Yuffie telling him over and over again that everything would be alright because he was sitting under the best tree in the best forest in the world.

Everything would be alright because he was in Wutai: where it should not have begun, and where it may never end.

Reeve, true to his word, sent him updates on Yuffie's condition via WRO operatives visiting Wutai. The envelopes came stuffed with drawings of trees in Yuffie's new favorite colors. Vincent had asked Reeve to stop sending them; they were just like the tattered letters in Yuffie's old home. The commissioner insisted, however, and he had called Vincent to tell him so, begging that Yuffie demanded he get them. He decided to hang them in Xie's room to avoid fixating.

Funny how that logic failed him.

He wondered how Yuffie Kisaragi could sort out the colors in her head and how Xie Kisaragi could name the shapes in her own, when his objects produced nothing but white noise and dirt caked under his earth-scratching fingernails.

But maybe that's all it ever was, Vincent thought: white noise, dirt, and green trees. The rest of the world be damned. Valentine curled his hand around the tree moss and beat his fist against the trunk. He did not want to think that way anymore. There were things inside his head and people in the world, and try as he might, he could not wish either of them away.

He should not want to either.

-

Godo Kisaragi sat on his golden floor mat, glaring obstinately at the crime report resting on his right knee. He sucked at his tongue, bored and irritated by the sir name that headed every violence record that made its way to the top of the pagoda. After the assault on the royal establishment that Vincent Valentine had warned him about—not much of an assault after all of the gods had prepared themselves—he had seen to the incarceration of the three family heads. Attacks on tourists had grown sloppier and easier to trace, but they still occurred with maddening frequency. Godo had begun to suspect that the family had access to some new-fangled cell-replicating technology.

Either that or the Sven women were very busy indeed.

His sleek black PHS shuddered next to his sandal. The Lord of Wutai glared at it for several moments and contemplated heaving it down the stairs instead of answering. Only one person used his personal number anymore. The rest came to visit him, or first contacted Shake, whose time lately had been delegated to secretarial work.

Reluctantly, he lifted it to his face in disgust and jabbed the "Answer" button.

"What do you want, Valentine?" he dressed his voice in his best go-boil-your-tongue-in-Da-Chao's-hot-spring tone.

"I was considering dinner," he answered gruffly.

"Well don't let me keep you, then," Godo retorted. "I imagine it takes a great deal of food to maintain enough energy to stick your great wide nose in my business every day. If it's a very critical matter, don't waste your time talking."

"Do you mind meeting me at Turtle's Paradise in an hour?"

"I don't know what gave you the impression, but I don't date men." Godo felt his color darken.

"You need to go out more, Lord Kisaragi." Vincent ignored the jibe. "You'll start to get fat if you sit in that pagoda all day eating nothing but rice. I bet your skin will fall off, too, without proper vitamins."

Not noticing it, Godo pulled himself to his feet, waving his fist at no one in particular. Crime reports floated lazily to the floor with a flutter like a spinning shuriken. "Don't you _dare_ talk to me like that! I only let you keep that shop of yours out of the goodness of my heart. One more word out of you, and I'll close that thing down, do you hear me? Where did you even learn to talk to me like that? I always took you for a mild-mannered man, but no more! You hear me, Valentine? No more!"

"Excellent," the man's bored voice continued, undeterred. "I'll expect you to pick up the tab then."

"Did you even listen to a word I—?"

Click.

Then Lord Godo did chuck his PHS down the stairs. After which, he proceeded to roar at the gold rug and toss empty red rice bowls against the walls.

Confound Vincent Valentine. Only Yuffie had permission to push his buttons like a four year-old with a tuning fork. She had passed vital information on to Midgarians, interfering with national security in the process. If she were not indisposed, he would wring her ruddy chicken neck. In one final childish display, Godo stubbed his toe against the rug and snorted.

Rage spent, he ambled to the closet, tripping over piles of dry rice in search of his teal town robe. Upon procuring it, he folded back down on his creaking joints and stacked the empty bowls together before straightening out the rumpled floor rug.

The last of the day's papers stood in the corner ready to pick up and hand in to Shake. He busied himself with properly lining up the corners to avoid thinking about the thing that bothered him the most about his conversations with Vincent.

As much as he roared, hissed, and sputtered, as much as he would deny it if any curious soul ever enquired, it felt good to get that worked up again. It made him hope, just a little, that those friends of Yuffie's knew what the hell they were doing.

He struggled with a stiff smile and tottered down the stairs.

-

Valentine watched the old man—who, in reality, was slightly younger than himself—grip his glass of brandy tightly as he lifted it to his lips. He knew the silence made the Lord of Wutai uncomfortable, but Vincent felt disinclined to break it purely for the benefit of his gracious patron.

Turtle's Paradise provided a cozy evening atmosphere. Darkness made it difficult for normal humans to see. The rich scent of imported pine wood weaved like grease in Vincent's skin. Red lacquer graced both the bar and the table frames. A lit white candle dotted the center space of each booth. Vincent waved a bronze digit over the flame and watched soot leave lipstick-mark kisses.

"Would you not do that?" Godo scratched his shoulder irritably. "It's creepy."

Vincent rested his clawed arm on the table with a swish and a clink. He ruffled his menu, searching out the lowest priced item. Taste had never numbered high on his priority list—less so after Yuffie's burnt eggs.

"Why do I have to suffer through this then?" Godo cleared his throat. "You seem perfectly content to just stare at your menu and ignore me. It's a disgrace to drag me out to a pop tent like this when I have so much work to do. Not that I'm ungrateful, but this 'you warned me' thing is getting thin. I should forget about it by tomorrow and treat you like a peasant again."

Several moments of silence followed before Vincent decided that Godo had finished his rant. "I didn't want to be alone tonight."

Godo blinked slowly—at least once, and Vincent guessed he blinked again after that, but he had already buried his face in the menu—and cleared his throat for a second time. Clearly, he had not expected that response. Cloth ruffled, and Vincent could hear Godo fidgeting nervously with his napkin.

"I—well, I'm not just at the whim of your—your—"

Vincent lifted an eyebrow over the menu, and Godo began staring intently at the candle in the center of the table. "Just don't expect me to say 'you're welcome.'"

An even thicker silence followed, in which the waiter made his way over to their table to take the orders. The man's tongue had turned into soggy bread when he recognized Godo, but the Wutainese Lord only told him to "Shut up and take the orders to the kitchens."

Though Vincent requested the cheapest full course on the menu, Godo demanded the priciest.

Dishes came out on silver plates that Vincent had reason to suspect—in the form of a small boy in an apron flinging aside the front doors in his haste to slip outside of the acrylic red walls—had only been purchased recently.

The gunman deposited a forkful of fried rice and cabbage into his mouth and chewed it slowly. Godo summarized his thoughts best, having tasted the duck.

"I won't complain on the grounds that it's better than the steamed rice at the pagoda."

He then, of course, proceeded to cringe when Vincent scraped the prongs of his fork against the silver plate.

The flame of the candle flickered low as they ate. Vincent watched the shadows on the wall with muted curiosity. He wondered if he had only forced himself out with Godo Kisaragi to end up alone still—only a sort of very loud alone full of complaints and awkward "Hm"-ing. It served as an ineffectual way of searching for human connection.

But then Godo put some real effort into his last-ditch attempt at sparking conversation. "How is—how is Xie?"

Vincent nearly dropped his fork. "I thought you only wanted good news?"

"I'm allowed to change my mind." Godo sounded affronted. He shoved his plate away from him. His saggy cheeks twitched. "It isn't written anywhere that I'm not."

Vincent eyed the wet shine on Godo Kisaragi's palms while he tried to grasp at the words to best answer the other man's question. "She thinks you have admirable qualities for a goat, and she's upset that President Shinra isn't coming to our wedding."

"Mad as ever then." Godo prodded portions of duck carcass with the fat end of a chopstick.

After the requisite period of silence, Vincent added an afterthought. "She might be, but I can't see how you would know about it."

"You're hypocritical," Godo scoffed. "You carry on about how you have to stay away from Yuffie, and you want to criticize me?" He waved his chopsticks in circles, flinging crumbs onto the tablecloth.

"There's a difference." Vincent flicked aside a stray morsel that had fallen onto his plate. "Yuffie's content in her own head because I've made an effort to understand for too long. She needs to try to work her way out. But Xie's gotten to the point where she doesn't even want to make the effort anymore. No one's following through on the other side. Nobody wants to understand her, so why should she try?"

"Don't talk to me about my family like you know them better than I do," Godo snapped.

"Why not?" Vincent pursed his lips, though he knew Godo could not see it over the frock of his cloak. "I do."

Deflated, Godo's back folded, leaving the old man hunched over himself. At least three fourths of the duck remained untouched, but he ignored it. His eyes followed the wavering of the candlelight. "I'm trying," he told Vincent.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm trying, alright?" Godo's eyes flared like strong wind in heavy snowfall. "It's going to take more than six months for any of us to let go of who we are. And that's what we're doing, by letting go of the bad parts; we're letting go of ourselves. Don't expect me to wake up tomorrow and be okay."

Valentine stared into the eyes that matched the puerile candle and lowered his fork with dedicated slowness. The eyes may have matched the candle, but the words crushed and opened two different things inside of him. "Thank you," he whispered.

"Err—no need to thank me." Godo cleared his throat and shook his head. A smug grin curled onto his face. "Now if we're talking about material, I—"

The PHS in Vincent's breast pocket jerked with a loud vibration, cutting Lord Godo off.

"Thank you," Vincent repeated. His eyes darted down to his unfinished dinner, and he braced his hands on either side of the table to stand. "I'll see you around."

Godo strangled his napkin and watched the red cloak dart from Turtle's Paradise. "You really are going to stiff me with the bill, aren't you?"

He called out, and Vincent heard, but he had already slipped away too far to care.

-

Walking with new speed and not bothering to decipher the direction that the pictures in his head pointed him towards, Vincent snatched the PHS from his pocket and pressed it to his ear. "Yes?"

"Hello Vincent," a nervous yet commanding voice purred. "It's Reeve. I'm calling to talk to you about Yuffie."

"I know," Vincent said, still thinking about Godo's words in the bar.

"Do you mind if I—?"

"Reeve,"—Vincent continued to follow his feet for the second time that night. This time they led him toward the front gate—"we've discussed this. I'm willing to hear any news you're willing to give me. Even if I don't _really_ want to hear it."

"It's about the paintings."

"Hn."

"I trust you received the most recent one."

"I did," Vincent assented, closing his eyes and trying not to guess at directions.

"I was hoping you could tell me what that was about."

"I don't know, Reeve. I'm not exactly around."

"Yes, but I thought you and the green—"

"If you didn't notice with the whole running away thing," Vincent growled, "I have my own problems to contend with, and thinking about Yuffie hasn't gotten me good places." He turned a corner.

"But don't you think that this is a little different? You should be able to put aside your own problems for larger ones."

"And how would you know how big the things that are wrong with me are?"

"What?" The telephone cracked.

"You never bothered to ask," Vincent whispered. "You just assumed it was guilt and darkness—like I did."

"Vincent, what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the…" And then Vincent looked. His feet had stopped moving, placing him four feet in front of Yuffie's tiny cat-infested hovel. The mewling echoed through the door. He had not even spared a glance at the musty lot since he returned to Wutai.

"Vincent?"

In five steps Vincent stood directly in front of the entrance. When he pressed his hand to the wood, he thought he could feel it breathing.

"Reeve, are you still there?"

"I think so."

"I need someone to talk to." It felt like something was clawing and writhing inside of his throat, and he had just released it.

A silence on the other end passed when Vincent shoved the door in. "I am talking to Vincent, right?" Reeve's voice quivered. When Vincent did not laugh, much less reply, he added "Wh-what did you need to talk about?"

A kitten wandered to the doorway, hissing and spitting. As Vincent kneeled, it jumped backwards with a yowl, shedding yellow fur on the entryway. Valentine chuckled quietly to himself, gripping the phone so tightly he felt the plastic splinter.

"I'm not so sure." He stood and walked toward the desk, staring intently at the layers of dust caking the letters he recognized so well.

"Helpful."

"I mean to say—I think"—and here Vincent sat down to rub his finger over the bite marks on the last letter—"that I will need someone to talk to, but I'm not ready yet. I won't be, for a while, but I want to be." He sat down in the chair and lowered the collar of his cloak to blow the dust from the desk.

"Oh—umm—yes."

"Reeve, about the green—she was afraid of the green because she got lost in the forest the day she couldn't help Ishwara Florette." His eyes scanned the untidy scrawl without reading it. He recognized pressure exerted by the same orange tabby from his last visit rubbed against his calf.

Vincent heard words in his head, concrete and startling, vivid and real unlike any of his verbal memories, repeating Lord Godo. 'It's going to take more than six months for any of us to let go of who we are.'

"Vincent," Reeve whispered through the smoke of fresh words, swirling with the colors they left behind, "she's getting better."

And because he was too, he let himself believe it.

With a steady hand, Vincent clicked shut the PHS. He pulled a new piece of paper from the side drawer and started to write a letter. This one, he knew, was not for Yuffie. But he also knew that, by the end of the week, another one would be.

_Sorry if the ending was weird and longer than I anticipated, but I liked it, so I'm not too apologetic. I will, however and as always, take any constructive criticisms you have on it._

_Now please bear with me while I leave the requisite gushing thank you to my readers. I really mean it. To anyone who ever read, reviewed, loved, cried over, clicked on, hated, wondered 'what is up with?', favorited, or alerted this story. I especially want to thank those who started reading this and stuck with it to the end, despite the rough patches. I doubly want to thank anyone who told me that this was shaky or difficult to read. I learned so much from this story. Despite my frustrations, I enjoyed writing it, so I'll probably overhaul it a bit at a time and make it spiffier for new groups of readers some day, so drop me some advice. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoyed it too. I expected that maybe one or two people would read this, and here I stand with nearly 60 reviews. It means so much to me, so if you haven't told me what you think yet, I would love to hear from you. Thanks again, and I hope to see you around._


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